I promised myself I’d never pull an all-nighter for school. Watching my friends drag themselves to first period in sweats, latching on to a Starbucks coffee to find some energy to get through the day after their concerningly frequent all-nighters terrified me. 

I’m not proud of the fact that I broke that promise a few days ago. 

In my defense, that was my first time pulling an all-nighter. And at that moment, it was absolutely unavoidable. Was it a result of my poor planning regardless? Yes. 

But looking back, there was something strangely unifying in that experience — maybe because I wasn’t the only one who was barely awake, trying to submit the essay I had a week to write (oops) by the 8:30 a.m. deadline.

At midnight, I opened the link my teacher posted to the assignment’s instructions, and found about ten colorful circular icons on the top right of the page. Relief. I wasn’t the only one working on it. Determined, I split my computer screen into a collage of overlapping windows: a FaceTime with my friend (who, like me, also had an essay to create out of thin air), an online PDF of the novel I had to analyze, and a blank document for my essay. 

Every now and then, I’d unmute myself, read out a sentence to my friend and ask her if I made sense: ‘hey, does this sound like a coherent sentence or like I’m writing it last minute?’A few minutes later, she’d do the same. 

As time passed, the circular icons on the Google doc with instructions started to disappear, leaving only me and my friend behind. 

Birds chirping. It was 6:30 a.m., and I was almost done. I just needed to churn out a conclusion.  

Thirty minutes later, my friend and I submitted it together, celebrating the end of our own self-inflicted misery. 

Now, would I want to relive that experience? Absolutely not. But, was it still somehow enjoyable? Yes. 

This isn’t just about pulling all-nighters. It’s about the weird phenomenon of seeing students choose to lose sleep I see around me. I know I do. 

In 2022, California became the first state to mandate middle and high schools to start no earlier than 8 and 8:30 a.m. respectively. But for some reason, we just can’t utilize this opportunity to get more sleep. 

For some of my friends, the seemingly endless cycle of doomscrolling on social media before bed is like an inescapable ritual. Just five more minutes, right? Then we can go to sleep. But that’s not usually the case. 

Why can’t we sleep more? Well, part of it is biological. Adolescents experience rapid body changes, disrupting sleep as our circadian rhythms reset — delaying our sleep cycles. Instead of starting to feel sleepy at around 8 to 9 p.m. like children do, most adolescents' bodies will nudge them towards sleep at around 11 p.m.. I suppose that explains my 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. productivity slump. 

There’s also an environmental reason. The consistent presence of blue light our computers, phones and televisions emit trick our brain into thinking it’s daytime, diminishing the flow of melatonin in our bodies. Part of that is the constant access we have to these screens for recreational purposes, and another part is schools’ recent shift into online assignments and projects after the COVID-19 pandemic. It doesn’t take much to put everything together: we can’t sleep earlier because we don’t let our bodies help us sleep earlier … and because our bodies don’t let us either. It’s a vicious cycle. 

Sleep matters. We all know that. I think I can speak for most students when I say that we don’t like losing out on sleep — that we are fully aware of the consequences of sleeping for five hours a night, or pulling all-nighters. Most of us also know we procrastinate. But the cyclical nature of our relationship with sleep is fascinating and paradoxically present nonetheless. We need it to survive, but somehow we willingly (or unwillingly) keep dismissing it, and end up falling asleep in class when we shouldn’t need to.