The fatigued student paradox: can we really do anything about it?

 One of the most interesting decisions ever taken in the history of user interface design is hidden in most clock apps: when you set an alarm, a pop-up notification immediately appears to notify you how much time you have until its demonic sounds break into the peacefulness of your sleep.

And this notification is definitely one of the most common images in a student’s life. It’s 2:00 a.m., you’re under heavy influence of caffeine-loaded drinks and the dim yellow light of your desk lamp is the only evidence that light ever existed in the world around you.

You are very sure of this because the light in your eyes has definitely gone away. After 10 straight hours of working on a presentation that you have most likely procrastinated for the past week or so, the only thing you can think about at that moment is turning your laptop down and, finally, go to sleep.

When this sought-after moment finally comes, you turn off your desk lamp -thankfully for your roommates- and go to sleep. Yet, right before sleep comes, its own death has to be announced: no student can go and rest without an alarm being set up first.

The clock’s always ticking, and the alarm is always eager to remind you so. In fact, when you finally go to sleep, the last thing that your infinitely tired eye balls see is the “Alarm sounding in 4 hours” pop-up that we have already discussed. And 4 hours is not nearly enough sleep for any human being.

Yet, resorting yourself to having that amount of sleep every single day of your life feels, sometimes, like the only option. In a never-stopping world where opportunities come and go at basically light-speed, being a student is not an easy thing to do.

Deadlines are always running after you, but they are not a lone chaser as much as they are only the leader of an entire platoon seeking out for your head. FOMO, extracurricular activities and family life are only a few of the many stalkers that are, sadly, an inevitable part of being a student.

However, I would argue that none of those are as harmful by themselves as tiredness, a direct consequence of them. It does not only hamper your capacity of going on, but it also affects your ability to be efficient: even if it may be not powerful enough to prevent you of doing work, it will affect your ability to do it correctly.

It is also very hard to get rid of tiredness. In fact, it can take up to four days of quality sleep in order to account for the “sleep debt” caused by a single night of bad sleep. In other words, if you pull an all-nighter on Monday to submit a deadline, you will have to go to sleep with military precision for the rest of the week in order to recover from it.

We all know it does not work like that. One all-nighter leads to an afternoon of naps that end up making you go late to bed again, and the next day you wake up a little bit later so you end up being very tired: yet, you cannot go to bed early because you had another homework to do… and it keeps going like that. Sleep is rarely a constant in a student’s life.

The problem with this reality is that its consequences might be life-long. From halting physical growth to stimulating the appearison of diseases such as hypertension or diabetes, sleep deprivation can lead to many consequences that are very different from just submitting a deadline on time.

And, for me, none of this makes sense. How come we need to alter something as essential as our sleeping schedule and remain most of our days in a perpetual tiredness only to meet our basic necessities?

There are various approaches to this question. The first one is, of course, the organization argument: if you sleep late, you need to organize your day in a more efficient way. While this might remain true for many cases, I do not think that sleep deprival due to academics can be completely avoided through organization.

For example, imagine that you have three or four tests on a single day. Even if you start studying a week or two before, your memory is probably too limited to retain all that information intact for such a long time, thus forcing you to do a review the day before the tests come. And that review takes a time that is not necessarily always available.

Another argument that might be used in order to answer such a question would be related to priorities. A well-known rule states that there are three S’s in student life: social life, sleep and study, but you can only have two at the same time. While it might be proven true, I think it is a completely senseless idea. A life with only two out of those three elements would not only be boring, but can also turn unhealthy.

Tiredness in student life, then, seems to be something you can’t escape from. The more tired you are, the less rest you get: thus, a true solution for it seems almost impossible.

The way our system works does not really help. In a world of deadlines, midterms and finals, there is not much that we can do in order to find a true solution for the tiredness paradox. Yet, I don’t think all hope is lost.

One of the main things we can do in order to try and find a solution for the tiredness paradox in our daily lives is actually understanding if it is actually worth it to be tired sometimes. If you have a test next day and plan on studying until 3 a.m., is it actually worth it? Would the increased knowledge overcome the effect of the added tiredness?

Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. And it is completely unpredictable. So, this is not a definitive solution.

Another proposed solution for this paradox would be simply assuming it and not being tired at all: from the three S standpoint, this would mean taking the “sleep” one as a definitive one and then alternating between “social” and “study”.

The issue with this one is that both socializing and study are always there. There is always a party to go as much as there is always a test to study for: thus, what is the order? Of course, in a finals season or during a break the decision seems obvious: yet, those are very limited periods throughout the year.

Most times, the border that separates the priority of studying from the one of socializing are rather diffuse. On a regular day, without any incoming deadlines or special social compromises, it can get quite hard to choose between going for a coffee with your friends and reviewing for a subject you don’t have any upcoming tests at the moment.

And both decisions might be as perjudicial. If you completely stop going out with your friends, your social life might start vanishing and that can be a big problem by itself: one basically as big as the one caused if you just study for tests a day before.

Another potential solution bites the dust. We could keep discussing different solutions to this issue, but it is very likely that all of them will arrive to deadpoints similar to the ones already exposed.

So, what can we do about the tiredness paradox?

First of all, accept it. I really think a current student’s life is not imaginable without a certain degree of chronic exhaustion going on. Our bodies are simply not hard-wired for the constant influx of information of all kinds that we are always exposed to.

School days that are very rarely less than 8 hours long and are usually followed by a 2 or 3-hour social corollary are always exhausting. It means being exposed to all kinds of information for the whole day that ranges from that related to social interaction to purely academical data, and this can be too much.

Therefore, being tired is natural. And recognizing it might be the first step to fight against it: if you cannot defeat them, join their side. If we play on tiredness’ side, we can have a chance of winning the game of student life.

This would be, for me, the second action we can take to solve this paradox. Playing on tiredness’ side also means not letting it consume too much of your life, both on a physical and psychological perspective.

As a beholder of the questionable title of energy drink enthusiast, I need to admit that tiredness might be already invading my physical health. However, even if I have been consuming them for only two years or so, I have already noticed the negative effect they have on me: now, it is very hard for me to be fully functional without any caffeine on my system.

So substances are probably not the best companion to fight tiredness. Yet, I think that not letting tiredness consume too much of your life can also have an influence on the scheduling side.

If being tired is okay, then you have to accept when it is the time to be tired. In my personal case, naps are a particularly sharp reflection of this. If I take a 30-minute nap, I am probably going to go to bed at least 2 hours later: therefore, it’s not worth it for me to take and nap. Better remain looking like a zombie for the last 3 hours of the day than look like a zombie for the wholeness of the next one.

And my last take on this issue is, basically, about a question: is it meant to be like this? Should we be always tired just in order to have a barely functioning academic life?

That, I don’t know. And I am not sure if our current system does.