The Importance of Sleep.

First, let me say the sun actually shone today. It was a wonderful, life-changing fifteen seconds.

Sleep.. is a necessary thing. It is sometimes welcome and other times a hindrance. This past week it has been a hindrance, which has only helped to emphasize the necessity.

In the past, I have found that a busy day full of things like school, activities, and even work, interferes with other activities, such as spending time with friends or talking on the phone. Now, usually people will try to balance the two in a normal day's hours. Or so I would guess. However, the others of us decide to just create more time in the day. This is done by spending less time doing other activities. Like sleeping.

There have been times that I have talked on the phone much more than necessary. In fact, talking on the phone got me into trouble more than anything else in high school did. Mom, don't cringe when you read this, please. I used to spend hours a night on the phone. This was done by either using my cell or the portable phone. Eventually I was caught, and received punishment, since my parents at least understood the importance of a full nights sleep. This is one of those cases of parents knowing best. Looking back, there were a number of rules I didn't understand at the time. "Why can't I stay up all night? It's me who has to be tired.." And in retrospect, parents are just trying to look out for us, keep us from failing school from being too tired or falling asleep at the wheel or thinking that we can shirk on sleep and still function as normal people.

However, let us reminisce on those days.

There were times that I stayed on the phone for hours, and times where this severely coincided with sleep. I remember, more than once, getting on the phone before I had gotten any sleep and staying on the phone until the sun rose, leaving me less than an hour to sleep before I had to be up to begin the next day (which usually involved a lengthy nap.) Usually, though, I got two or three hours on such nights. There were times I could barely stay awake in school or church. And somehow I would do it again the next night. I sometimes wonder how I made it through those days, but that's all in the past. In retrospect, it wasn't the best idea I ever had, for a number of reasons. However, I can't change the past.

Either way, eventually I reached the age where I could actually hang out with friends for hours. Now that I'm an "adult," my parents let me figure out how to balance sleep on my own, since they gave me more than enough lessons as a teenager. I took those to heart, and am somewhat more careful in my balance of time, though not up to their wishes, I suspect. For example. Over Christmas break and this summer, the issue is that I have to be at work at 8 in the morning. It's a half hour commute, so I have to be awake a little before 7ish. This isn't a problem as long as I'm in bed at 10ish. However, eventually other friends come home, and for whatever reason, hanging out between the hours of 6 and 9 is completely impossible. People don't even begin making plans until 9. As such, I'm usually out with friends until about 2 am, which is my unofficial curfew. The rule is as long as my parents know where I am, I can be out, but there is a point where I'm out ridiculously late. So we settled on 2 a.m., I tell them where I'll be, and I'm back on time.

This only leaves me four or so hours of sleep a night. Usually this isn't a problem. I can handle a night of four hours. It's actually a step up from where I've been in the past. The problem occurs when this happens 5-6 nights in a row. Then my body begins to function oddly. I also suddenly find taking naps, something which has usually been difficult for me, to be involuntary.

Without sleep, work seems much, much longer. Time, instead of passing at the speed of a drizzling rain, seems to slow to the crawl of a snail trying to outrun this rain. (He doesn't, by the way. He is much slower.) Also, these are the days that I end up sleeping on the bench in the locker room on my break. Instead of appreciating my hour long combined lunch, morning and afternoon breaks, I scarf down my food and find a way to balance myself on the foot wide wooden bench in the locker room, until I'm awakened by the sound of the gates and jump up all too soon to help with the residents. My head is pounding the entire time, and everything irritates me. Being irritable is probably the worst side effect, as it involves people trying to make friendly comments. This is why I decided to nap between getting home from work and going out. It greatly reduces these side effects.

At college, this was less of a problem. Usually I could just sleep in the next day, though I'd feel like I wasted a day if I slept in past noon. Which happened too frequently for my liking.

Looking back, I'm thankful my parents wanted to look out for me as a kid. I remember being so frustrated with them at times, and now I'm beginning to truly appreciate their true motives for me in their discipline. I'm glad that they now let me make my own decisions, and realize on my own that having a curfew means I can still be back earlier, like midnight, and get the sleep that I know I need. I'm glad that they trust me enough to allow me to make my own decisions and discover how to act intelligently on my own.

And I'm glad that I can finally fall asleep in the middle of the day to make up on lost sleep.