What causes your sleeplessness, whether it’s your anxiety or insomnia, is insignificant. Meaning that similar to parsing out depression, the causes are multiple and interconnected; instead of aiming for individual symptoms, tackle the problem as a whole. To illustrate the point, let’s say someone has a lung disease and by consequence they develop a severe cough. Giving them cough medicine might mitigate that particular symptom, but it won’t eradicate the disease as a whole.

Similarly, don’t go shooting in the dark for causes when you should instead be concentrating on snoozing in the dark.

"A bad pun deserves another bad pun"

You’re throwing your life cycle out of whack by evading sleep. Getting back on track means finding ways to get a reasonable amount of rest.

Reasonable doesn’t have to mean eight hours. Get real, you’re in college, there are bound to be red-eye nights you’ll have to brave for purposes of edumacation, and nights when you simply can’t shut off your brain.

What you need is an arsenal, a tool belt that can be used to stave of that menacing sleep-disruption wolf.

"Why not stay up one more hour? Class doesn't start till seven in the morning anyway"

And that’s just what I’ve got for you today. Read it and sleep!

"Please, no more puns, I'm begging you"

No Sleep Aids on Weekdays: Forget ZzzQuil, it’s a rip-off anyway. The last thing you need is to pop twice the regular dosage and sleep for 16 hours straight on a weekday. If you need to catch up on some sleep over the weekend, get some generic Benadryl, it’s the same thing but cheaper.

Get a Better Mattress: This costs way too much for an average college student. Better yet, invest in a decent pillow. Most of the sleepless nights I’ve had I can attribute to a cheap pillow causing neck pain or general discomfort. Think an $80 pillow is out of your budget? It’s hundreds less than a mattress and alleviates much of the frustration of falling asleep on an uncomfortable bed.

"Like sleeping on a bed of rocks"

Organize Your Tomorrow: You got an elephant-load of work to finish tomorrow and not enough hours in a day to possibly fit everything in. At least, not in your head. Write out tomorrow’s schedule hour-by-hour. You’ll be surprised how much more manageable things look when they are systematized in front of your eyes.

Write Down Your Dreams: Jot down your dreams in the morning. John Kehoe suggests you don’t do this immediately, and instead let the dream gestate in your mind as you slowly awaken, so as to recall specific details. Writing out freaky or weird dreams are not just conversation fodder—they can give you story ideas, facilitate your creative writing and give you a reasonable incentive to go to sleep at an appropriate time.

Make a Lullaby Playlist: It doesn’t have to be ambiance or nursery rhymes. It just has to be slow and soothing. I’ve gone through the trouble of compiling a short playlist just for you:

This Lullaby – Queens of the Stone Age

A Thousand Kisses Deep – Leonard Cohen

Aldrig Ensam – Jonathan Johansson

Beautiful World – Rage Against the Machine

No Coffee or Other Stimulants: Does this even need to be on the list? Even if you’re cramming, don’t facilitate with coffee and get your circuitry fried in the process. If you have to, cram until you fall asleep naturally.

Take a Shower: Unless you’re collapsing into bed after a workout, getting into bed after being out all day is just asking to feel like you’re sleeping in a pig trough. Take a shower, wash off that grease; you’ll wash off some stress in the process.

Do a Little Work: Ripping your hair out over the myriad tasks waiting to take you apart piece by piece tomorrow? Do a few minutes of each task before going to sleep. It gives you a head start and peace of mind.

Hug Something: Hug your partner, hug your pillow, hug your mangy stuffed animal you haven’t cleaned since you were a kid. It’s occupying your hands so you won’t flop around like an agitated fish all night, trying to get the perfect position. I suggest a plush Cthulhu.

"Hug me while I quietly devour your soul"

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Aleksandr Smechov, Baruch College.

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Our last post left us dangling on the subject of balance; specifically, balance as the centripetal force behind helping students overcome depression.

But before moving on, a brief side note on my use of the word “depression.”

Personally, I prefer to use the word’s blanket term connotation, which includes everything from “feeling sad” and “negative,” all the way down to more harrowing stuff like “I’m going to kill myself and nothing’s changing my mind.” Am I being inaccurate by covering such broad grounds with a single word?

"Depression can be an effective blanket term"

Using “depression” to cover such an immense range of emotion can be a double-edged sword. But the sword is definitely proportionally challenged. As in, one half, the half that has the drawbacks of blanketing “depression,” is so dull you can’t even cut butter with it. The beneficial half can split atoms.

"He uses the dull edge to make his morning toast"

Maybe that’s a bit of a hyperbole. But what if you feel unnaturally sad, just for a day or two every few weeks or once a month? Just intermittent sadness, not over an extended period of time, not overly extreme to the point of suicide, but something that stops you in your tracks and prevents you from moving on. “I feel kind of depressed, but I’m not actually depressed, otherwise, I’d feel like this every day, and to a much more frightening degree.” This might pop into your head after such an episode, and you might chuck any notions of depression out the window, either for reasons of being hard on yourself (“Why should I call myself depressed when others are suffering more than I am?”), dismissal (“It only comes around sometimes, so it’s probably nothing”), pride (“I’m stronger than that, I just have my weak moments”), embarrassment (“What will others say if I tell them I’m depressed? Will they be more awkward around me?”), or anything else that causes you to toss out the notion that you may need to do something about this soon.

I aim to use “depression” in the less clinical sense and focus instead on the semantics of the word itself: “sluggish in growth or activity”, “low in spirits”, and “sunk below the surrounding region.” Obviously, not all of these pertain to psychology, but nonetheless they are less restricting and more associable for students who don’t consider themselves technically “depressed”

And the great thing about looking at the word semantically is that it helps reach a wider audience. Students will more willingly accept help and advice when they feel less judged and pressured by strict definitions and connotations, in turn preventing more severe symptoms from developing in the future.

So yeah, I lied, that wasn’t a very brief side note. Here’s a picture to make it all better.

"Why does this even need a caption?"

… And back to reality we go.

Tragically, ironically (tragonically?), college life is a recipe of unbalance, rife with owlish sleep schedules, late night face-stuffing (junk food, pills, whatever your preferred poison), massive procrastination,  last-minute rush-a-thons, self-consciousness, quarter-life crises (that’s the plural for crisis, fyi), and a whole load of other scale-dislodging activities.

One of the biggest, baddest and meanest wolves in the pack is the disruption of a balanced sleep schedule.

"His icy mission: keep you awake as long as possible"

As not to be a conventionalist-luddite-person-thing, let’s just get the studies showing how sleep deprivation can temporarily help major depression out of the way. Yes, the subject is well documented, proven to work for the duration of time that the person doesn’t go back to sleep, and it seems like a perfect provisional remedy for students who need to brave entire nights anyway.

I wouldn’t suggest you go actively experimenting with this method, however.

Despite the soundness of the data, this is not a self-administered procedure: it’s done in a controlled clinical setting. And yeah, there’s that whole relapse thing after you go back to sleep the next night. Temporary fixes like not sleeping, along with over-caffeinating yourself, taking uppers, last-minute cramming and other get-shit-done-quick equivalents for maintaining productivity without having to actually work on yourself are so prevalent that they’ve become the only way most students know how to operate in college.

"Helps you get washboard abs in only two weeks!"

Tragonically, these insta-fixes leave out the necessary work that goes into long-term self-development, and serve little purpose when it comes to overcoming depression further down the road.

“What about insomnia?” you ask. After all, while sleep deprivation can be intentional, insomnia is a condition that is not voluntarily discarded whenever the insomniac wishes.

Regardless of whether your lack of sleep is intentional or not, the point is if you’re not sleeping, you’re going to have a hard time maintaining balanced, organized life in college. The goal of this post is not to determine whether you can or can’t control your sleeping habits, it’s to acknowledge that not sleeping will throw your already busy college life out of whack and make it harder for you, in the long term, to perform at your best.

I’m getting dangerously close to my weekly word limit here (also, I have to sleep), so watch out for next week’s post for a plethora of ingenious ways to help yourself go to sleep. Sleep is one of the most essential steps in physiologically tackling depression and getting on the road to an all-around well-rounded life. Dig it!

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Aleksandr Smechov, Baruch College.

Follow the Campus Clipper on Twitter and Like us on Facebook!

Interested in more deals for students? Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter to get the latest in student discounts and promotions  and follow our Tumblr and Pinterest. For savings on-the-go, download our printable coupon e-book!