In college, you always hear that you can only pick two – grades/work, sleep, or having a life. I know lots of people who quickly decide to give up sleep, and they can get by on less than 6 hours of sleep so it works for them. I am not one of those people. If I don’t get at least 7 hours of sleep, I’m a mess. I’m irritable, emotional, and can’t focus on much of anything or eat a real meal. It’s just bad. That being said, sleep is definitely one of my priorities because without it, the rest of my activities fall apart as well. An occasional night with little sleep is okay, but too many nights in a row and I go downhill fast.
Luckily, I’m pretty good at managing my time so I haven’t really had to give up much to accommodate my body’s need for sleep. When I first went back to school, I was still very weak so my social life was limited by my energy level but that got better throughout the quarter. It was also a bit of an adjustment to start working full time for my co-op, but again I adjusted in a few weeks. It helps that my body has a great natural alarm clock – if I wake up at the same time for at least two days in a row, it’ll wake me up at that time every day without an alarm. This can get really frustrating when I just want to sleep in a little, but it’s nice to worry less about my alarm and easier to get on a schedule. Sometimes I envy the people who have so many more hours in the day because they need less sleep, but I know I’ve put my body through a lot and the least I can do now is let it rest when it needs to. How much sleep do you need? As much as I’ve enjoyed the A-Z Blog Challenge, I am glad it’s finally May so I can rest a lite more! I’ll have a reflection post up this week and a medical update post over the next few weeks as well. Thanks for reading!
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorI’m Karen. I was originally diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) in August 2004 when I was 10 years old. When I was working on my college and scholarship application essays two years ago, I wrote about my journey. Although it was a rough few years, it became such an influential part of my life that I can’t, and wouldn’t want to, imagine my life without having had cancer. I called it the worst best thing that ever happened to me. Archives
April 2022
Categories |