“Today’s a bad day,” you text your friend shortly after returning from school. You're swamped with homework, and frankly, today wasn’t the day for that. The struggles of your day simply won’t allow you to focus on your homework like you should. You procrastinate from 6 o’clock to 7. 7 turns to 8, and not before long it’s 11 o’clock, and your homework hasn’t been done. You’re mindlessly scrolling Instagram, it’s the only thing keeping you sane. A friend texts you they’re bored and you tell them the absolutely horrible day you’ve had. The only thing is, this “bad day” happens more often than not, but your friend doesn’t know that. They confidently respond, “Go to sleep.” A statement you’ve heard too much but the only thing you needed to hear. You close your eyes and slowly drift out of consciousness, homework untouched, yet your day is over. This sentiment is a common trend that I’ve noticed somewhat recently. To sleep the moment the sun sets, at the end of a bad day. Of course, no one literally means that, because both me and everyone else have far more homework than what should be allowed, but I digress. Why is it that sleeping is what we should do to wash away our problems? An even better question, why does it feel that it works? Here, I don’t hope to answer the question but provide a definition that I’ve developed through a culmination of my experiences.
Defining something nebulous as sleep is pretty difficult because I believe it’s more than the definition on Merriam Webster. “A condition of body and mind that typically recurs for several hours every night, in which the eyes are closed, the postural muscles relaxed, the activity of the brain altered, and consciousness of the surroundings practically suspended.” While yes it literally is what the definition defines, connotatively sleep extends far beyond that definition. Granted, there is an important phrase in the definition I’d like to focus on temporarily, that being, “the activity of the brain altered”. This alteration of brain activity may be the reason why sleep seems to refresh you. However, as previously mentioned in my anecdote, sleeping feels as if it cleanses me of my problems, and that cleansing is so important that it draws me away from my work, sometimes, but very rarely because I’m a very good student. Regardless, the irresistible allure of sleep tempts me nightly, despite the fact that if I sleep my immediate exhaustion will be cured, but my ever-increasing load of homework will only pile up more. Yet, it’s encouraged at the end of a “bad day”, and that’s what’s so interesting to me about the idea of sleep. It feels as though it only purges my immediate problems, and quietly allows my other ones to pile up. No matter what negative emotion overpowers my mind, the moment I lay on my pillow and my eyes close, the sun is up, its beams beating into my body. And I couldn’t be happier. I feel cleansed until I open up my eyes and see clothes on the floor, my phone’s at 2%, and I remember I haven’t done any homework. Then I’m instantly thrust back into the mindset I was in about 9 hours ago, but at least I’m not exhausted.
I spoke to a friend about what I should write relating to sleep because I had a decent framework for what I wanted to write but was feeling a bit lost. She suggested I could write about how it feels unattainable due to our phones which made me think back to my original anecdote. “You’re mindlessly scrolling through Instagram”, almost parallels, “consciousness of the surroundings practically suspended.” Coincidence? I think not! Maybe a bit of a stretch, but my phone puts me in a similar comatose state as falling asleep does, without the aforementioned short-term cleansing. This led me to the logical conclusion that I should procrastinate doing my homework in a different way that doesn’t further my sluggishness. Jokes aside, it’s genuinely unnerving how eerily similar scrolling through social media and sleeping is, and I know it’s a bit of a tangent, but I had to share my hypothesis with the world. So, in conclusion, I believe that sleep is a period of time when you lose consciousness and it cleanses your temporary emotions but tragically leaves all of your tangible baggage. This may of course be a problem exclusive to me, or even just a heavily romanticized reality of many of my peers, yet it’s one that I repeatedly deal with, so I wanted to write about it. Also, I didn’t take psych so I could just be completely wrong, but I had fun!
Bibliography
“Sleep.” Merriam Webster Dictionary 30 Oct. 2023, Merriam Webster. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sleep
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