“If I go to sleep now, I can still get a solid 4 hours…”

I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve used this line to tell myself that my behavior is okay. I’ve also attempted to sharpen my mental math skills trying to figure out the latest possible time I can go to sleep to get four hours of rest. It’s a minimum I’ve determined myself, a number of how many hours I believe I personally need to function. But I can never seem to get it right because I make these decisions when I’m already sleep-deprived, which leads me to poor choices and staying up until I only have four hours left.

So what happens? I wake up feeling sluggish.

What’s keeping me up from getting the eight hours I actually need? Is it simply because there are not enough hours in the day? Should we, as a society, change our perceptions of time? After all, we have daylight savings, which further proves that time is really a social construct. I shouldn’t waste time thinking of things that I have no control over – but this is just one of many things that keeps me awake at night.