In college, I often stayed up until the wee hours studying. I was a type A perfectionist, and while I don’t regret all of the time that I spent studying in the library and in my dorm room, I do regret not getting enough sleep. As I am getting older, I am realizing that without sleep, the body literally cannot function. Our bodies were not naturally made to function on less than 7 hours of sleep. I think because I was so sleep deprived, it made it hard for me to stay awake in class. And when I was tired and stressed, I would resort to piling my plate high with food and eating until I was overly full. Of course, because I would eat lots of food before my next class, I would get sleepy. One minute I would be enthusiastically jotting down notes about Immanuel Kant and Rene Descartes, and the next thing I knew class was over and my notes went from being legible to looking sloppy.
It also did no favors for my rapport with my professors. One year I took a class about Western classical music history. The professor was nice to me at the beginning, but as class went on, he started being less nice. When he would hand people worksheets, he would toss mine at me so that it would fly through the air and I would have to pick them up from the floor. I realized in retrospect that I was drinking Bigelow Sweet Dreams tea before class and it was making me sleepy. One time while I was studying in the library (it was a performing arts library next to the music department building) the professor approached me and said, “I think you have narcolepsy.” It wrecked me. After he told me I might have narcolepsy because I was sleeping in class, I broke down, feeling embarrassed and ashamed. However, once I realized I just needed to stop drinking Sweet Dreams tea during breakfast, no matter how delicious it was, I stopped sleeping in class. Also, I saw how hurt my professors were whenever I would sleep in class, because when I would give presentations or talk to the class about something, I saw some students who were sleeping or had their eyes closed during my presentations. At first, I got upset, but as I chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo about my situation, I realized that I was sleeping in class and that it probably hurt my professors’ feelings, so now I was starting to understand that when people sleep through my lectures or presentations, it can feel like, Wow, that’s so rude and annoying, but so, too, was my sleeping in class.
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