Séamus Smyth
The Weal (Southern Alberta Institute of Technology)

CALGARY (CUP) — Generation Y — the Facebook generation, the deeply indebted generation and the spoiled-rotten generation — loves to assume the worst. Students who can’t remain focused on a task for 10 minutes immediately jump to the conclusion that they suffer from attention deficit disorder. Those who prefer keeping their room tidy instead of roaming around in a boar’s nest of clothing and dishes say it’s due to an undiagnosed case of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Students’ latest self-diagnosis regards their inability to fall asleep. No, no, it couldn’t be an easy-to-remedy issue — it must be the most extreme case of sleep deprivation: insomnia. No matter how many herds of sheep these poor zombies count, they just can’t manage to fall victim to the Sandman.

But is this really an unsolvable conundrum that most students can’t fix on their own? According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine website, the following can lead to major sleeping issues: a lack of exercise, too much caffeine, heavy smoking and using the television or computer before going to bed.

In other words, pounding back six venti cinnamon dolce lattes during your regular school schedule and then firing off 15 text messages just before you attempt to doze off might not be the most soporific course to take. Same goes for smoking enough tar to repair an entire highway or beginning a Lost marathon at 11 p.m. on a school night. And when was the last time you broke a sweat that wasn’t stress related? Giving the body a brisk work-out can help the great sleep predicament.

Although I am no sleep expert, I personally sleep every night like a three-year-old boy after a big day at the beach. So my advice would be to turn off all technological devices. Submit your attention to a good old-fashioned book. Allow your imagination to put in some last-minute work. Without channel-flipping, dialling, texting or sexting, your body can prepare for a few hours of doing absolutely nothing. If you can’t refrain from your coffee or cigarette fix, at least try to schedule the gorging a few hours before bed time.

Hopefully this helps you finally get up on the right side of the bed and allows you to be thankful for being relatively disorder-free.

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Photo: Alyssa L. Miller/Flickr