Why Should I Get More Sleep?

Why should I get more sleep? That seems to be an under appreciated question. It is not question that you ask someone else, it is something that only you can truly ask yourself. But be fore warned, lying to yourself can have the worse consequences. This is where my life took an interesting turn. After a couple of years I can now say I have recovered from the consequences of lying to myself in regards to that question.

A few years ago I decided that commuting to school and work 45 minutes from my home would not cause any problems. I would leave home early around 7am and between school, work, and friends would make it home around 2-3 am every day. Of course now I can see the error of my scheduling. During this period other people had brought up the issue of more sleep, all of which I brushed aside, thinking to myself "I can sleep when I am dead." if I had only known how close I would come to that ending.

I had just finished a full day of work and school, when I decided to spend some time with friends before heading home, this ended up being a very bad mistake. To this day I still cannot describe what every moment of the accident was like. The part that I do remember will stay with me my whole life.

Somewhere along the road at about 60 mile per hour I had fallen asleep. This is obviously where my memory is the most obscured. But what I woke up to is more vividly remembered than any single point in my life so far. I woke up to 4 headlights, to which I turned the wheel away. In the time of a split second I had woke up and turned the wheel, whether or not the car responded no one can ever say. As the semi-truck and I collided head to head, at roughly 60 miles per hour each, I shut my eyes.

This is the point in which my life turned. I opened my eyes knowing only that I had hit another vehicle. As I sat trying to gather my mind back into a small fragment of what it once was, a volunteer rescue worker arrived and tried to keep me talking and helped until official help arrived. After minutes of wrenching prying, and cutting I found myself in the back of an ambulance headed for the hospital. Where I received so many different pain killers that not only did I not realize that my femur was broken but the last thing I said before blacking out was giving the nurse my parents home phone number.

When I next awoke, I was in pain. Not the usual pain but a non- moving searing pain that spread across my whole body like every bone was being pulled out with pliers. Later I was informed that the only thing that had been between me and semi-truck was the small "A" post to the right of the front window. The semi- truck had hit me at an angle so that not only did the seat belt not even activate, but I was the closest thing to the impact point. To this day I realize that there was something else working to save my life and it was not physics, after all a four door Oldsmobile had shoved the front axle of a semi-truck up under the semi's front cab.

After years of rehabilitation, and putting my life on pause to heal, I am now fully healed. Most people will never understand what a life changing event this was. Some people will never understand why I will not drive tired. Without, and sometimes with, long explanations some employers still see this gap in my life as "omitting events". Either way I have received a new view of life, a renewal you could say. Sometimes I believe that the renewal on life was not worth the price, other times I feel it was worth it. What was not worth it, is the fact that if I had not lied to myself about why I should get more sleep, this could have all been prevented. So the question remains for you, why should you get more sleep?