The popularity of the saying "The longest journey begins with the first step," reflects a truism: The hardest part of almost any job is getting started. Very much like swimming in cold water, most jobs are not so bad once you get into them, and I have found that just knowing that fact is usually enough to help me get started. Whether it is painting a room in my home or writing a paper, I usually have to remind myself of this principle:
It is harder to start a chain of behavior
than to sustain the chain once it is started.
For many students, this first hurdle is getting out of bed. The temptation to roll over and catch a few more winks of sleep is often so great that they miss a morning class. The first prerequisite to the pragmatic approach to problems is: get the true facts. If you're too embarrassed to ask someone, the college library is functionally a reservoir of information. It is sometimes the case that the true facts show that what you are so worried about is actually not much of a problem after all. In other cases, the true facts point directly toward the pragmatic solution. In any case, you must replace hearsay, superstition, myths, faulty reasoning, and ignorance with true empirical knowledge about the matter.
One reason people have difficulty getting up in the morning is that they want to avoid the aversive realities of life-the work, the tests, the conflicts. Another very common reason is that the person simply does not plan enough time for sleeping. Let me first share a few facts about the need for sleep.
There are several stages of sleep, one of which is REM (for Rapid Eye Movement) or "paradoxical" sleep. It is paradoxical because the body is in very deep sleep but the brain is very active. If a person is awakened during REM sleep, s/he will likely say that s/he was dreaming and perhaps the eye movements indicate watching the dream unfold. This REM stage of sleep usually lasts about 20 minutes and occurs about every 90 minutes during a normal night's sleep.
REM sleep is vital for mental health. People who are allowed to sleep as much as they want, but who are awakened every time they begin to enter the REM stage, soon become irritable, nervous, moody, and generally distressed. Most important for our purpose, a person who has been deprived of REM sleep finds it very difficult to learn even simple new material, and is likely not to remember it later. It is possible that the biological material for learning is produced during REM sleep, but whatever the reason, you cannot do your best as a student without adequate sleep.
The best evidence suggests that five REM cycles each night are normally required for good mental health. Thus, the traditional eight hours sleep turns out to have a solid scientific basis. Therefore, a very important rule is to set a regular bedtime that allows for a full night's sleep. You may be able to get by on less, but you're probably short-changing yourself in terms of your full learning potential.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of regularity in setting one's bedtime and get-up time. Time-of-day/night is a "situation" to which states of mind, such as feeling sleepy or awake, can become associated. If you go to bed at about the same time most nights, and get up at about the same time most mornings, your biological clock will become adjusted to that schedule.