Christina Littlefield
There needs to be more respect for sleep on this campus.
I, for one, like sleep. Sleep is a wonderful thing. It helps you to be more alert, attentive and productive during the day.
Sleep restores your soul.
You know what happens when you don’t sleep? You get cranky and irritable, sure. But you can also make mistakes or cause an accident. Ever hear of the Exxon Valdez crash? Sure, the captain was a drunken sailor, but the two people steering were just sleepy. The tanker spilled enough oil to fill about 125 Olympic swimming pools, killing thousands and thousands of wildlife.
How about Three Mile Island? That nuclear meltdown started when someone on the night shift accidentally attached an air hose to a water hose. The situation worsened as sleepy workers made human errors in the resulting chaos that became a national catastrophe.
Since most Pepperdine students aren’t in the position to cause a major industrial accident, they may think they can get away with an all-nighter. But sleepiness does more than cause major industrial accidents. The National Sleep Foundation found in 2000 that 51 percent of Americans drove drowsy, with nearly one in five actually falling asleep at the wheel.
In the same poll, the Foundation also found that one-half of the American workforce reported that sleepiness interferes with productivity, and 44 percent admitted that this may cause their work to suffer.
My point? We need a nap.
It may have just been the impact of Valentine’s Day on a mostly single campus, but everyone was cranky last week. You know it’s time for a break when professors start falling asleep during their own videos.
It’s the college way to not sleep during the week and catch up on REM cycles on the weekends. But the toll is tremendous. For those of you who know me well, stop shouting “hypocrite.” I learned the hard way through weekly all-nighters how valuable sleep can be.
I, for one, took a nap in the middle of writing this column. I couldn’t help it. It was 3 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, right during the afternoon siesta time that the National Sleep Foundation says may be part of our natural body clock. And my bed was just calling my name.
We need sleep — but we’re never going to get it. There is homework and real work and classes and, of course, Songfest, which means there will be a few hundred more sleepy students around campus for the next few weeks.
Next week’s Spring Break will help. But then there are eight more weeks of grind. Maybe we can talk our professors into allowing us to skip one assignment to allow for nap time. Maybe not.
Or we could turn Convocation into community nap time. Let’s just all roll out our mats and catch some shut eye for that 45 minutes. Marriott could even serve us graham crackers and milk for our after-nap snack.
Sleep is like oxygen. Sleep is a many-splendored thing. Sleep lifts us up where we belong. All you need is sleep!
So what do you say? Nap time anyone?
February 21, 2002