College is a place where you meet all new people, have new experiences, and in my case, totally ruin your sleep schedule. This may not be the case for everyone, but at the beginning of my first semester, I was going to bed no later than midnight. I usually went to bed around 10 or 11, which I now see suitable for my grandparents, but maybe not so much for me. My usual time to go to bed now ranges between 2 to 3 in the morning. I would never have thought that I would be the kind of person to go to bed at these times since I had always been the one who would naturally wake up super early. But now I realize it was just my previous sleep schedule that dictated that. This new sleep schedule has solely been established due to my friends. As I started hanging out with them more and more, I began to stay up later and later. The first week of staying up this late was rough. I would stay up until 3 and then wake up for my 9:30. That was a fun time. The only reason I have a 9:30 is that during my first semester, I could wake up for class very easily since I would go to sleep early. But now, staying up late has made it quite difficult for me to get up for this class. I have already realized that next semester there are no 9:30s in my sights for registration.
Because I am getting significantly less sleep, I am more tired. And what do you do when you’re extremely tired? Caffeine of course. Clearly, that is the only option. Since I was getting less sleep than I was used to, I drank a ridiculous amount of caffeine because I was so tired. I would drink two iced double dirty chai’s, or for my non-caffeine-addicted friends out there: a chai latte with two shots of espresso. In addition, I would sometimes drink a London Fog latte, which is a more highly caffeinated tea. According to the FDA, 400 mg is the healthy limit to consume, which all of these combined are usually more than.
Drinking this much caffeine in one day, there are some side effects. According to the Mayo Clinic, some of these side effects include headache, insomnia, nervousness, irritability, frequent urination or inability to control urination, fast heartbeat, and muscle tremors (shaking). Let me tell you, you definitely shake with this amount of caffeine in your system, especially if there is no food in your stomach. Especially with me, I don’t usually eat in the morning (when I am drinking my caffeinated beverages), thus, I shake throughout the day.
Between the coffee and teas, I was drinking and the poor sleep schedule I was already facilitating, I have gotten myself stuck in a tireless loop, literally. Large quantities of caffeine force me to not get tired until those crazy hours of the night and experience bad quality sleep. I wake up multiple times a night, so when I get up in the morning, I am so beyond exhausted that I feel dependent on the need for caffeine, this has become an endless loop. The coping mechanism that I am trying to use, caffeine, to help me through the day, is actually making everything worse.