All I know about exam week is this: You loathe it with such intensity that you think of ways to avoid it, thinking that maybe, just maybe, your professor might forget it’s the midterms.

            However, it seems that exam week always gets the better of us, either through our raccoon eyes, or through our (almost) flunking grades. Tragic? It’s possible. Familiar? You bet. How do I know these things? Let’s just say the exam week is kicking my ass. My big, fat, grade-conscious ass.

            Instead of taking five after my English exam, I spent my Wednesday locked in my room and buried under all those Chemistry books. With Nescafe Ice as a friend, I thought I can finish my problem sets overnight, but I was mistaken. I thought reviewing for Chem was a cinch, but I was wrong again.

            At Thursday, Physics was not very sympathetic to my down sloping academics. It bombarded my brain with more Einstein stuff, and I felt like I was a computer with an information overload. In Kas1, my reaction papers were piling up and I am now imagining myself as a rabid typing monkey, trying to beat the deadline. And Math—well—everybody knows Math is hard.

            So you see, my life has been reduced to a small ball of academics. It is the only ball that I’m juggling, and yet, I still find the stunt very hard. My professors aren’t helping much and now it’s the exam week a.k.a. hell week.

            Right now, I am chalking it up to the fact that I’m in UP. But no matter what I do, something always takes the toll for my acads. Take my routine for example. Sleep, eat, study. Sleep, eat, study. A routine designed for heightening my academic performance but also a routine that doesn’t squeeze fun and friends in the picture. In fact, I’ve been so absorbed in my acads that this routine almost sounds like a mantra. Sleeeep, eeeeat, stuh-deeee. Sleeeep, eeeeat, stuh-deeee.

            Come to think of it, I have done a loadful of eating and studying, but not enough sleeping. Perhaps, I too have embraced the ideology that sleep is for sissies. In this digital age, more and more people exist in nonstop wakefulness that would turn most normal human beings into drooling zombies. Sadly, I am becoming one of them.

            According to Time magazine’s article Why We Sleep, our body is fighting us when we try to stay awake, even if we have the aid of a giant thermos of coffee. We think we are awake, but we experience bouts of microsleep--- moments when we zone out for anywhere between two to twenty seconds and drift out of our lanes and find ourselves rereading the same passages. Whether we realize it or not, our brain has already checked out for the night.

            I read the article and it amazed me how much research people do about sleep. They, however, might be just another sleepless scientist like Thomas Edison, the inventor of the lightbulb. The creator of the new science of wakefulness.

            True enough, my health suffers from my lopsided routine. And because of that, my acads which is the heart of it all, may suffer just as well. And so, I take my cue from Time magazine. I need to change my lifestyle.