Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve been experiencing something new: I have developed this annoying tendency to wake up at my alarm, turn it off, and go right back to sleep. The worst part is, most of the time I don’t even remember doing it. I’ll just wake up, look over at the clock – squinting a lot because I currently lack my corrective lenses – discover that it’s an hour or two past when I was supposed to get up, and find myself wondering “double-‘u’-tee-eff!?” Only after much pondering, to be done whilst I’m hauling ass in a panic to that class I just barely have time to make, do I realize that I must have turned the alarm off, thus sabotaging myself in my day-to-day activities, if not life itself.

Or is it really sabotage? Clearly, I have reached the limits of what my body is capable of, staying up late night after night doing one thing or another. In all likelihood, this is the only way my subconscious drive for physical and mental well-being can help me avoid getting sick … again. I must say, it doesn’t necessarily come as a shock to me that this annoying, if not ultimately beneficial habit, developed shortly after I pulled an all-nighter and almost immediately after I developed a minor cold. The thing about sleep deprivation is, aside from severely curtailing one’s ability to perceive and think logically, it also curtails one’s body from functioning properly, and that of course means weakening one’s immune system.

So if I had to guess, I would say that in that moment, as I was contracting Acute Viral Rhinopharyngitis (go look it up) without my knowing it, my trusty id decided: “Okay, Trey is obviously a fool, and isn’t going to change his habits for anything. I guess it’s all up to me, then.” And so here I am, short a couple hours of wakey-time every day, wondering how I can work with this.

Most people, at this point, would simply turn to coffee: either start drinking it, or increase the daily dosage; but not me. For one thing, I think coffee is disgusting. It may smell nice, sometimes, but it tastes horrible. But more than that, I believe that stimulants such as coffee prevent us from maintaining a healthy lifestyle, in the way they completely shut off the rest of the brain from the part that tells us when we are tired. When that happens, you may not realize it, but you are tired, and it will manifest itself regardless of what you try to do to stop it.

I have realized that there’s really nothing for it but to come up with a new schedule, one that allows me to get more sleep. It’s just a problem we have: We expect to be able to do whatever we want, regardless of what is logistically possible. Sometimes, however, we just have to understand and work around what we are actually capable of, rather than what we wish we are capable of. Like the wise man Mr. Callahan said: “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

Trey Treviño is a sophomore CTV major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].