Getting a terrible night sleep can not only mess up your whole day, but also your whole week. Here are all of the stages you go through as you attempt to fix your sleep schedule.
1. Realize you have a problem.
Imagine this: It's like 4 PM. You awaken to the sound of the sun being disappointed in you for sleeping so long. You wonder if you should eat breakfast since dinner is so soon. All of a sudden, it hits you: this isn't how your day is supposed to go. You should be eating breakfast every morning, without the fear that you won't be hungry enough for dinner! And you should be able to eat lunch after breakfast and before dinner! You've let yourself slack off; you're sleeping schedule is completely messed up.
2. Go into denial.
Psssh, it can't be that bad. I mean, it's summer. You should be able to rest as much as you want and go to sleep as late as you want. Who cares if you can't get sunlight because you've become nocturnal. That's why they put vitamin D in milk!
3. Be forced to acknowledge your horrible sleep schedule.
A few days after you brush your issue off, maybe hoping it'll take care of itself, your friends and family corner you. "Why don't you ever hang out with us in the morning?" they say. You shrug. "I've been pretty busy this summer, actually... doing stuff. Like making paper airplanes out of my old textbooks." They glare at you. You begin to sweat. You actually realize that you miss having human interactions, and you examine your life for a while. Finally, you must acknowledge that you're on a horrible sleep schedule.
4. Decide to fix it.
Acknowledging the problem is at least 50% of the solution, probably. Now that you've decided that you need to fix it, it shouldn't be that hard, right?
5. Spend all day planning how you're going to get to sleep.
Whether you decide to stay up all night and the next day, or you decide to turn off all the lights at 9 PM and drink fifteen cups of warm milk, you've got to choose a battle plan. You debate in your mind which will be most effective for you and tweak each detail until it's finally perfect.
6. When night comes, stick to your plan--kinda.
Well, fifteen cups of milk is a lot of milk, and you're sure that just five minutes of Googling cat pictures might relax your mind enough so that you can drift off...
7. Have a moment in the middle of the night (or once the sun comes up) when you realize you have failed.
Your search for beautiful cat pictures led itself to a search for cute armadillo pictures and then cute goat pictures. Then you wondered how much it would cost to build a goat farm, how much goat milk sells for, how to make goat milk soap... When all of your farming questions are finally answered, you feel the familiar sensation of the sun telling you it's time to go to bed.
8. Wait a few days then try again.
Gee, trying to fix your sleep schedule sure took a lot out of you. Better wait a few days to try that again.
When you do finally decide to try, you've got a similar but slightly different plan that you know without a doubt will work this time.
9. Fail once again.
It could've worked, if you'd only remembered to go buy some milk. Besides, those goats aren't going to farm themselves.
10. Wait until school starts.
At some point, you just stop trying. Either that or you keep trying and trying until the night before school starts again. Then you figure out that there's not much point in trying too hard anymore.
11. Be forced into a decent sleep schedule.
Every day for a while, you're exhausted when you go to class, but the fact that your classes are new keeps you awake during them. (Until later in the year when you spend half the night working on assignments for all of those classes.)
12. Repeat again next break.
"It's summer again, but I'm not going to mess up my sleeping schedule this time!" Right. There's no way you could do that. Nevertheless, those goats are still looking for someone to make soap out of their milk.
