College is hard. It’s the hardest thing any of us have probably experienced in our lives, but it’s not worth destroying your health over.

Everyone jokes about the “college lifestyle” of no sleep and a diet of ramen noodles, and for a lot of us that may be our actual reality.

Ramen noodles aren’t healthy (we all know this) but it’s cheap and available in large quantities.

Caffeine pills and energy drinks, however, can be avoided.

You have to study, understandable. But averaging less than 10 hours a week in sleep is ridiculous.

Human beings need sleep, without it we literally begin to fall apart.

Lack of sleep makes you less smart; you make rash choices and aren’t thinking clearly. Without sleeping properly, the suggested seven to eight hours, you will not retain that material you have been studying so furiously.

So put the book down, shut up and go to bed.

Besides not being able to retain information, sleep deprivation makes you more likely to gain weight, more susceptible to depression and more likely to abuse a substance.

Not getting enough sleep is proven to be detrimental to your mental and physical health in the long term.

You may just experience moodiness and the occasional delirium. In the future, you may be dealing with chronic medical conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, according to healthysleep.edu.

By not getting the sleep you need, you’re shortening your life expectancy.

Your immune system is also suffering from lack of shut-eye.

When you are sick, you go to bed, but those that don’t sleep don’t have a properly functioning immune system.

Sleep differs from person to person, according to a Harvard study.

Some need more; some need less. It’s up to you to find out how much you need, but three hours isn’t going to cut it.

Grades are important, and so is maintaining your GPA, but sacrificing sleep is not worth it.

You won’t get anything done productively by skipping sleeping in favor of studying or finishing homework.

Set up a schedule and stick to it. Set aside time for homework and projects and try to do so before seven at night.

Get to bed at a decent time and sleep for the number of hours you require. Your mood, health and attitude will definitely improve, and so will your grades.

If you’ve built up months worth of lost sleep, recovery won’t happen in a single night.

Expect it to take weeks. You may sleep upwards of ten hours a night at first, but the amount of time spend sleeping will gradually decrease.

Don’t rely on caffeine pills and energy drinks, and definitely do not mix the two.

They will boost your energy in the short term, but can disrupt your sleep pattern even further in the future.

Take care of yourself; nothing is more important than you. If you’re busy dealing with the stress of not sleeping, your grades will suffer along with every other aspect of your life.

We all want to graduate with that shiny four point zero GPA, but if you have to deal with insomnia and health problems for the rest of your life, is it really worth it?

The answer is “no,” by the way.

Religion can be spoken about freely, yet we tread softly when publically mentioning it.

But, the hardest idea to grasp is that having the right to spread religious awareness is certainly not the same as pushing beliefs on others.

While people reserve the right to practice religious freedom and to speak without restraint about any faith they choose, forcing others to listen isn’t freedom of speech; it’s harassment. 

There are over 127 major religions and seven billion people on earth with seven billion different views of God. Some love Him, some fear Him, some question His existence and some are still searching for Him.

Some will decide that God plays no role in the trials and tribulations of life, while others will find faith the moment they see their newborn child take the first breath of being.

Whether we discover where we spiritually belong in a pew on Sunday morning or on a lonely drive with no destination, the journey to finding or forgetting God is what determines our views. We can’t be told what and who to believe in, or to even believe in anything at all.

What we learn, who we meet and the challenges we face are what we remember when we stand before Him, not the church members that knock on our front doors, or the people that stand in the quad condemning us all to hell.

And if the church goer at your front door changes your perspective, let them. Be baptized in one church, change your mind, and be baptized in another. Let what you learned in biology class make you question evolution and the powers above.

Learning from life experiences and questioning God’s ways isn’t sin; it’s human. It’s human to change emotionally, mentally, and spiritually when physical surroundings change. It’s human to simply be curious and indecisive.

Faith only exists because there are people that believe strongly enough in it to make it a reality and a way of life. Without doubters and differences, the strength of religion would never have anything to be measured against.

Because of that, religion without true belief is weak.

Never practice out of habit, don’t follow just because your parents or friends do, and don’t ever think one religion is superior to another. In a time that seems to have the explanation for everything in a test tube or on a database, people believing in any God at all is a miracle in itself.