Insomnia

As many of my fellow bloggers pointed out, another quarter has gone by very quickly. What that means is before we get to push away our pens and notes for a week (yeah! spring break!!!), we must survive one last week of classes and finals. With 1 group project/presentation, 3 group assignments, and around 35 student reports to grade, I was overwhelmed last Sunday night and experienced the first insomnia in my life.

While many people have pulled "all-niters" before and know what that's like (I've done several of those in my undergrad days for "non-academic" reasons, LOL), not being able to sleep is completely different. Imagine closing your eyes and there are just tens and hundreds of thoughts racing through your mind about projects, deadlines, grades, etc. You can feel the back of your neck getting tense, then you jump up from your bed, breathing hard. You gaze at the clock and it's been 2 hours since you tried to sleep and yet you're still wide awake. These were precisely my experience late Sunday night / early Monday morning.

I repeated the above activities for about 3 times trying everything I can to fall asleep to no avail. Eventually the sky started turning blue and it was time for class. I somehow managed to go through the day (8am - 7pm) without falling on my face and fortunately I was able to sleep with the help of Nyquil in the subsequent nights that week.

There are two lessons learned from this experience: 1. Time Management - Plan your deadlines well and plan them early; 2) Stress Management - this ties back to time management, don't build up pressures on yourself til the very last minute. Otherwise you've read about happened to me, ha!

Enjoy the spring break, everyone. To my fellow MAccers, we got one more quarter to go!!! woot!

Henry