One of the biggest nourishments in life is sleep. To me it’s better than eating, it’s better than chocolate, and even better than ice cream. We can live for weeks without food or water but not without our sleep.

To emphasise the importance of sleep in a student’s life I’m going to refer to an experience of mine in an exam earlier this year. The lecturer said it was going to be a fairly tough exam and that we should prepare for it well seeing as it counted towards our final grade. But being the ignoramus that I am, I left it to the last minute and didn’t begin studying till the night before the exam. I pulled off an ‘all-nighter’ (no sleep, whatsoever), and assumed I had it all covered. After reluctantly swallowing two teaspoons of instant coffee and sculling a 1.25-litre Coke I walked into the exam and felt ‘wired’.

I was wide-awake and ready to spew out everything I had learnt in the span of about six hours. Here is what stuffed me up; the examiner says ‘thirty minutes reading time begins now’. Normally this is a good thing, for the prepared student that is. You see; crammed knowledge has a life span of about a day, and even then it is extremely susceptible to ‘blackouts’ (totally forgetting everything you studied in the blink of an eye). So here I am, stressed about having a ‘blackout’ and anxious about what I was suppose to do for the next 30 minutes. Then I felt a sudden surge of fatigue. Without even thinking about the consequences I lay my head down on my folded arms and slowly shut my eyes.

Next thing I heard was the examiner yelling, "15 minutes left till pens down". I had fallen asleep for the last hour and forty-five minutes, not to mention accumulated a puddle of drool on my exam paper.

From then on, I’ve practiced a healthy sleep life. Giving myself at least eight hours of sleep at night, with naps when I need them during the day. It’s your worst enemy during VCE but at the same time it’s your best friend. The cunning student will never neglect his sleep, or at least not do so when he’s got an important date the next day. The ingenious student will learn the lesson the hard way, and end up like me.

Are you getting enough sleep? http://web.tickle.com/emode/tests/sleep.jsp