Olivia is a junior education major. Although this semester’s schedule is a little lighter, she decided to cut back significantly on her job at the student center cafeteria to have more personal time. She had to take out a larger loan for the spring and summer semester, but hasn’t regretted her decision at all. She felt really burned out a couple months ago and felt like it may have been affecting her schoolwork.

With her newfound personal time, Olivia has been enjoying taking in part in many of the activities she missed out working late night in the cafeteria. Now she has more time to study, hang out with friends after class, and participate in intramurals. When she doesn’t have plans, she typically enjoys a nap after class.

The semester has been going well. Olivia notice improvements in her grades at midterm, and also helped lead her co-ed intramural kickball team to a championship. She has also realized that she has been having trouble sleeping at night. She feels this has resulted in her feeling tired most of the day. She occasionally falls asleep in class and often daydreams of getting back to her room for a nap. Her once occasional nap, has become daily and has also doubled in length to nearly 2 hours.

Olivia has maintained her grades by staying up late to finish work after her nap, but wants to get back on a normal schedule. She has found herself turning down invitations from friends after class so she can crawl into bed to nap. Olivia now feels like she is precisely where she was last semester when she had a full work schedule.

After class one day, Olivia Googled “insomnia”. She soon ruled out insomnia as her condition, but after another 10 minutes of research she began to think that her daily naps were the source of her daytime sleepiness, rather than the solution. She thought back to when she first noticed having difficulty falling asleep and realized it seemed to coincided with when she started napping regularly. The thought of going without her afternoon nap made Olivia wonder how she would ever get through the day.

The next afternoon, Olivia realized if she went to her room she would not be able to stay awake. Instead, she planned to go to the gym. She repeated this process for the remainder of the week. Initially, she noticed no difference in the urge to sleep after class. The following week, she noticed she had spent the last couple of days falling asleep almost as soon as her head hit the pillow around 10pm. She was now waking up energized. This energy seemed to last throughout the day. Olivia once again found a balance between her schoolwork and her social life.

This is a great example of replacing prolonged naps with other activities to get your sleep schedule back on track.