I cry a lot.

This is not a new thing. I have been pegged as the family cry baby for as long as I can remember — an ironic title for the oldest of four.

I cry when I am sad. I cry when I am uncomfortable. I cry when I laugh. I cry when I am sick. And, most recently, I cry when I am stressed.

While incredible in numerous ways, college is a breeding ground for anxiety. If it’s not difficult enough to balance coursework alone, add in the pressure of friends, significant others, extracurricular activities, competitive classmates, being social, finding internships, the desire to not let your parents down and maybe a dash of homesickness and there it is: the tears are abundant.

Even those whose eyes don’t consistently well up are probably still stressed out regardless of how they handle it.

We get up early for class, go to bed late studying and when we do get a free night to go to bed, we often choose to spend it with friends who want us to not be lame. All of this leads to a lack of sleep and in turn, more stress and more tears.

On average, I get four to five hours of sleep a night. This is about three hours short of the necessary eight hours of sleep that most adults require, according to the chairman of the board of the National Sleep Foundation, Charles Czeisler. He classifies anyone who gets less than this on a daily basis as “sleep deprived.”

This deprivation makes waking up in the morning harder and dealing with school just as difficult. In turn, we become even more overwhelmed.

And when you do have the time to catch some Z’s, being stressed makes it hard not to toss and turn your way through the night, University of Pittsburgh’s Martica Hall said in an NPR article published on Nov. 17, 2014.

“When people are haunted by life, they cannot sleep very well,” she said. “…Daytime stress follows you into the night.”

Stress causes the body to produce extra cortisol and adrenaline, increasing both heart rate and blood sugars. This in turn creates so much activity in the body that it is hard to stay asleep. It forces you to lie in the darkness and harp on all of the things that that need to be taken care of the next day — projects, papers, jobs, tests.

This means that even the small amount of sleep that you are receiving is not helping to curb your stress, and perhaps is even fueling it further.

Dana Becker, the author of the book “One Nation Under Stress: The Trouble with Stress as an Idea” describes how people think they can just “cure stress,” when in reality they need to find the source of their stress and address each individual piece contributing to it.

So should you stay up all night completing your work, or go to bed stressed about what you need to get done?

Perhaps there is no correct answer.

And this is slightly perturbing.

An environment such as college, which is meant to cultivate you for the future and educate you about the world, should not be one that has you in tears each night when you lay down. What does it say about our society that we place so much pressure on our students that they need to caffeinate themselves through an all-nighter in the library?

For me, I know I need to stay-up as late as necessary in order to complete certain tasks, but sometimes, when I can no longer keep my eyes open, I have to surrender to a choppy night of sleep. I also know that despite what Becker believes, there are certain things which calm me down such as running, drinking tea and yes, crying.

For those of you who have not yet found activities that take off the edge, take comfort in the fact that you aren’t alone in your struggle and that Thanksgiving break is right around the corner — a time during which you can hopefully find a few restful nights.

Alex Archambault is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major. You can email her at ararcham@syr.edu or follow her @Alex_And_Raa on Twitter.

Published on November 9, 2015 at 8:45 pm