Exam Time. It’s 1:15 am and you have just tracked some fresh snow into your room. Your roommate greets you with a grunt and a roll. “When you getting up?” you ask. “8” they mumble. “I need to get up at 7” you declare, removing all your cloths and getting in bed immediately, no pajamas, no tooth brushing. With 5.5 hours of sleep, you calculate you will have enough energy to finish your take home and study for the in class portion of the exam which is taking place at 12:40 the next day. Lights out, in bed, eyes closed….
Fidget—roll over—take a sip of water
You cannot shake the impulse to go over the exam material in your head one more time while you stare into the back of your eye lids. In doing so you get an idea for your paper and have the impulse to get up and write it down before you forget it, but you stay in bed, knowing that you need every single second of sleep. Your nose suddenly itches and you satisfy the slight disturbance, asking the ago old question, why the hell do things itch randomly on my body? Then you are caught thinking, an itch erupts on your thigh, then your scalp. You try to ignore them, but they are insistent, like someone ringing the doorbell over and over…
Fidget—roll over—take a sip of water
You are now actively thinking about falling asleep, trying to urge your mind to calm down, but in doing so you only excite it more. The blankets are too hot, so you remove a layer. Then you are too cold. At this point it’s 2:10 and you check your phone, sighing with frustration as you fall back to the pillow. You’ve lost a whole hour to the toss and turn. You begin to blame things for this unplanned lost hour, the red bull you drank at 10pm, the cleanliness of your sheets, the amount of pillows, the size of your bed, perhaps your bed partner for taking up too much space and not letting you get comfortable. At 3:15 you begin to start panicking. Your heart rate is elevated, your forehead is damp. The tosses and turns become exaggerated and you have given up on keeping your eyes closed. Every little noise seems like it’s coming from a megaphone right next to your ear.
Get up—eek out some urine—stretch—take a sip of water
It’s 4AM and you are furious. The 7am wake up time no longer makes sense and your study time has been compromised. You set your alarm to 9am and lay back down, distressed to the point of tears.
This is a horrible scenario to be in, but it happens to everyone occasionally. It happened to me not long ago. By 4:30 I finally was able to calm myself down with a breathing exercise I learned long ago. I wish I had remembered it sooner. The trick is to focus only on your breathing and nothing else. Let every other thought and noise and itch pass through you, in one ear and out the other. Hold onto those long methodic breaths; let them fill your entire consciousness.
Other good ways to fall asleep are visualizations. Ever notice that you begin to dream in the moments before sleep? That’s the goal of this exercise. Pretend you are in an action adventure movie, give yourself a goal, setting and character then go on the adventure. You can also imagine yourself back in a cherished memory, for me I am on a lake in Ontario paddling in the morning through mist rising from the water’s surface.
Challenge: Make sure to get enough sleep so you can crush exams, then don’t get arrested during spring break. It sucks being called to a South Carolina court in April.
Hammer Time
