Hedy Gutfreund  The only thing we Latin students love more than sleep is complaining about how little we get. Pulling an all-nighter for Nazi Mind sounds glamorous; writing a college essay at 3 in the morning sounds like it really just might reflect your truest self. Maybe that all-nighter was necessary, and maybe you found your inspiration about overcoming a challenge right before dawn broke. I’m not refuting that, but I am refuting the group mentality that less sleep is better. We all fall victim to it. Sometimes I’ll stay up talking to a friend because if I go to sleep at 10PM every night, there are only two things I could be: a robot or under-committed. Social media only perpetuates this—if I’m not responding to your question about our math test, I must be avoiding you or, gasp, actually sleeping before 11PM. I’m not sure which seems worse. “How do you ever get any sleep?” becomes a compliment for packing so much into a schedule while finding seven hours to do nothing but go through multiple REM stages. If I have seven hours to sleep, I could probably fit in an extra club in all that time, right? I could study that extra hour for biology and take the lead on my Microeconomics project or take thorough notes on my AP Euro reading for the first time since September (sorry, Fript), and that would be better, right? I could finish this Forum article before the proper deadline, right? It seems like, if I don’t sleep, I could get it together a little bit more. But I don’t think that’s true. As I approach my eighth semester as a Latin high school student, I find myself happier and more capable of dealing with stress if I can get myself into bed before midnight. (And if I find myself going to sleep after midnight, I also see my number of hours on Buzzfeed steadily increasing). I might be rationalizing not being more productive throughout the day, or maybe my body requires more sleep than most. Or maybe I’m just not hooked enough on caffeine. The mentality of not getting enough sleep implies something deeper: that we are expected to do everything well, all the time…just forego sleep. But I propose something else. It’s not drastic, and it’s not a revolution, but it’s just a slight culture shift. Let’s make it cool to sleep.]]>