HUMAN SKILLS
PART 1: SLEEP

Let's talk about something we all want more of. No, not cookies, though I'll admit one can never have enough of those either. I mean sleep.

The sweet, sweet blissful slumber of the carefree, well-rested person is not something most students are familiar with. I'd love to say it gets better after finishing school and that those sleepless nights of studying will be gone forever.

But that would be a lie. It's just not true, and I could never lie to you. Getting enough sleep is maybe the most difficult part of balancing life. We want to succeed at school and work, enjoy leisure time and creative hobbies (Small engine repair! Pottery!), and also catch all the Zs we need in order to form full human sentences and tie our shoes. Welcome to the school/life balance dilemma. It's a doozy.

Some students, normally in the throes of a sleep-deprived delirium, argue that kids these days are treated as learning machines, expected to input metric tons of information day in and day out, and then go home to do three or four hours of homework, maybe have time to eat something, and then perform community service or engage in extracurricular activities to make them gorgeously desirable to potential universities. They're right. This is exactly how students are asked to spend their glorious, fleeting youth.

Lather, rinse, and repeat this cycle for an average of 15 years.

Feel exhausted just thinking about it? You should. That strenuous academic routine can wear down even the most driven of grown adults, and we're asking this of teenagers. It's brutal. In the face of this many time requirements, the mantra is often "Sleep is for the weak."

But it's really, really not. Sleep is pretty much the best thing ever, and we want you to get just the right amount of it. We're shooting for the Goldilocks ratio here: not too little, not too much.

To put it bluntly, sleep is the best energy drink. And yes, I realize it isn't a drink. Here's how to get enough of this tasty energy non-drink.

• Find out your ideal sleep schedule and your bare minimum to stay functional by keeping a sleep journal. For two weeks, make a note of how much you slept and how tired or productive you felt throughout the day. I've found that anything less than seven hours, especially over time, makes me worthless through the next day.

• Schedule sleep into your calendar as you would any other activity, like homework.

• Do top priority tasks first so that when sleep calls, what's left on the To Do list can wait.

• Set a bedtime alarm to go off a half hour before you need to be asleep to remind you to call it quits and brush those pearly whites. Footie pajamas optional.

• Don't study or do anything but sleep in bed. No reading, no TV watching. Just sleep.

• Go dark. Put electronics on power strips you can turn off at night to get rid of all the random little red or yellow or green blinking lights that interfere with sleep. Bright streetlight outside? Grab some blackout curtains. Noisy neighbor dog? Go with earplugs or a white noise generator.

• Avoid waking up in the middle of a REM cycle by planning sleep in 3 hour increments or using a sleep tracking app. Having an alarm go off in the middle of deep sleep (instead of light sleep) can make you groggy all day, even if you got enough total sleep. For the app loving, I can't get enough of the iOS app Sleep Cycle.

• If missing some sleep is absolutely unavoidable, limit it to one late night toward the end of the week. Take a 20-minute power nap the next day and then catch up on the other missed Zs missed over the weekend. Starting Monday morning with a sleep deficit makes for one long, awful week, and you'll end up getting less work done than if you had just cashed it in for some sleep originally.

• Ever turn your alarm off by accident instead of snoozing and wake up 45 minutes late? Me, too. Banish alarm panic by setting two different alarms and placing both far enough away from the bed that you have to get up to turn them off. Yes, it sucks. Yes, it may be necessary.

• A 10-minute snooze is just enough to fall back into deep sleep and have to start over again, so set alarms to go off three minutes apart.

• Light and music boost the waking up process tremendously. I'm not saying you have to start the day with a dance party, but it couldn't hurt (I may be a huge fan of dance parties...). Grab a light timer for a bedside lamp to automatically flick the lights on and get that a.m. party started, and set a third alarm to start jamming your tunes. The more jarring and upbeat, the better. I may or may not have a secret love for Pandora's '80s cardio station.