In no way at all should I be considered a spokesperson for self care. My self care routine, if it can even be deemed a routine, is subpar. It’s the kind of thing that ebbs and flows with how exhausted, anxious or whatever else I feel. I don’t even know that it could be considered self care by other people, that maybe what I consider self care is someone else’s base level daily routine — just a part of them that doesn’t even occur as something that takes much thought let alone effort.

Now, I am doing what I can to work on these habits. And while progress is never exactly linear, I can say with some certainty that it’s getting better. Over the past year or so, my sleeping habits have especially improved. So much so that I’m a little prideful that I can maintain something so definitive. That I actually follow whatever self-imposed rules I’ve set for myself, for the benefit of myself.

Unfortunately, these rules seem to conflict with the general consensus of campus culture. In fact, what prompted my writing this article was hearing the proud declaration of someone’s third all-nighter that week.

I think I want to amend my previous statement: this isn’t just campus culture, it’s the culture of American, capitalistic society. Not be like, “SOCIETY! RAH! CAPITALISM!” But, I’ve noticed similar sentiments everywhere in my life. Whether it’s my mom or friends’ parents working so much overtime that they rack up nearly one-hundred work hours for company deadlines. Whether it was a high school classmate, bragging about how he was regularly running on three hours of sleep a night. Or how the media loves to glorify the exhausted academic trope, or the forty-eight-hour shifts toted on Grey’s Anatomy.

Somehow, we’ve gotten to a point where our worth is determined by our productivity. And, productivity is measured in hours. In hours worked. The more hours you’ve lost as an individual, the better you are. Maybe you haven’t slept in thirty-six hours, but that means you’re thirty-six hours productive. Eight or sixteen hours more productive than someone who follows the CDC’s guidelines for sleeping.

I myself used to feel a certain pride over just how little I’ve slept. How much I’ve done when I could’ve slept; wasted time. Look, I’m such a good student, such a diligent human being: I have the eyebags to prove it.

Somewhere in the past year, I’ve begun to rework my former mindset. A lot of that isn’t intentional to be honest. For whatever biological, explained-by-science reason, fighting off sleep is harder than it used to be. Waking up at 7:00  a.m. is what my body does each morning.

In trying to resist my body, and failing, I realized, duh, that things are easier when you’ve slept. I mean, I don’t think I’ll ever stop feeling tired. Exhaustion just seems to be my constant state of being. But it sure is easier to work with baseline tiredness than with three-hours-of-sleep tiredness.

That little myth “I’ll do the work in the morning before class” isn’t actually much of a myth in my case anymore. I still find it shocking and a little exhilarating that I wake up with the sun, get my daily espresso boost, and work for a couple hours before class. In fact, it’s become so reliable that now I hardly ever stay up late if I can help it. Now that fighting off sleep is so hard, I’ve just stopped trying to. When I’m tired, I just think, well, it’s not going to get any better like this, so I might as well sleep and look at it in the morning.

When I tell people this, it’s often accompanied with a hefty dose of embarrassment. So often, those little ideas of self-worth will pop up in the back of my mind. I feel bad, guilty even. As if what’s more effective and efficient for me, somehow makes me worse of a student or worker or person. All because I follow my body’s urges, and sleep when I’m sleepy.

The shame I feel when someone talks about how little they’ve slept, how much they’ve done, is like a little worm coiling somewhere deep in my gut. I almost feel a little disgusting. Like, what am I even doing here? Am I doing enough? Maybe I’m really not working as hard as I should. I mean, I’m only twenty; if I can’t handle my unbalanced life now, how am I supposed to navigate a real adult life? With corporate work, and maybe kids, and bills and all sorts of responsibilities that aren’t just school.

But then at the same time, I start to think, yeah, I’m only twenty. Sure, I could top load the difficult stuff now so that I can enjoy my life later, but how much of that later life is even guaranteed? What about my twenties? Aren’t these days and years part of my life too? Shouldn’t I try to enjoy them?

Without trying to get too existential, just look at the state of the world.

I genuinely have come to the conclusion that it’s a bit stupid to run yourself into a little shell of a person with eyebags bigger than your body and a head of grays and whites before you’re even thirty, all for the sake of maybe enjoying life later on.

In writing this article, I realize that it’s a lot less about sleep than I originally pictured it being. It’s looking a little bit like a “what’s the point of life?” critique of capitalism. So, I apologize if this isn’t what you wanted. But, hey, it is what I want. And truly, sleeping is such a nice, lovely feeling when it’s good. I deal with the occasional sleepless, insomniac nights as one is bound to. But when your sheets are the perfect kind of cool, and your body and blankets are just the right amount of warm and cozy, sleep is so nice.

It’s a break from the rest of the world and the difficulties of life. It’s what our bodies have evolved to do. Maybe I don’t understand the science behind it, but I trust that it’s okay to take a rest when the soft animal of my body, to quote Mary Oliver, needs it. I don’t want to feel ashamed for loving what I love, for something that’s as natural as breathing, as drinking water as blinking.