How to Feel Awake

We all know that sleeping 7-9 hours everyday is ideal. But there are just times/weeks when we don’t have the 7 hours. Our project is due tomorrow, the presentation needs to be written, or whatever reason that is more important than sleep; yet, we don’t want to feel like a zombie after a week of lack of sleep! So how to feel awake in the morning? How to feel awake in the night? How to feel awake when we work? How to feel awake when we need to listen to the lecture? How to feel awake when we need know to? Well, most people probably would go for caffeine-contained beverages such as coffee, even when we know the side-effects of it – but trust me, there are better ways for the “how to feel awake” question that have no side-effects, and are even more effective than Coffee since we will adapt to coffee to a point where it just doesn’t work anymore (but this method won’t). Too good to be true? Well, read on to know how to feel awake when we just don’t have the time to sleep.

Sleepiness can be cured with bright light!
Waking up drowsy and sleepy may be caused by delayed sleep phase syndrome (your internal clock and the time people have set do not match). The body has a natural internal clock that prompts it when it is time to sleep and when it is time to be awake. The normal clock induces a person to sleep at night, but when we don’t sleep early enough for a few days in a sequence, we screws up our internal clock. Using light to reset our internal clock will recondition the body to fall into normal patterns of sleep and wakefulness. It also keeps us awake in the day to do the normal stuffs too!

The solution to how to feel awake: expose yourself to bright artificial light for several intervals (15-30 minutes per interval) throughout the day to induce wakefulness – this is similar to the light therapy approach for patients narcolepsy. So you expose yourself to bright light that produce 10,000 lux of light for a 15-30 minutes. You can try using a Light Box for this kind of exposure. It’s small enough to sit on a desk or table, so it’s easy to put it at your work place or anywhere you want yourself to feel awake. So you should sit 18-24 inches away from but facing the light box, and complete tasks such as work or reading without looking at the light itself. This helps regulate the controls that keep you awake. But if you feel too awkward to use it in your office, a desk lamp would work too… and since it’s smaller and not as bright, it will blend in better in an office. After the 15-30 minutes of exposure, shut off the light and continue your work. And when you begin to feel fatigue or sleepy again, add another dose of the artificial light to keep you from falling asleep and to allow your body to condition itself into a pattern of sleeping only when it is dark, or at night as you should. But you should use bright white or blue light as it imitates daylight.

We all need to sleep enough to feel energetic, but when there’s emergencies such as a sudden increase of workload, sleeping 8 hours per night is simply impossible. For busy college students, sometimes it feels like how to feel awake is more important because sleeping enough is not an option. Consider buying a light box, it helps a whole lot in how to feel awake, both in the morning and at night.

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