Have you ever had a friend tell you they got only some abysmally small amount of sleep? Have you ever, in response, said you’ve gotten even less? Or maybe this situation has been reversed for you. I know I’ve been guilty of this, and yes, in both directions. In my experience, these kinds of conversations are everywhere on campus. Even your pet rock could conclude Carnegie Mellon has a culture where some unhealthy behaviors are normalized. I’m tempted to allege that we brag and boast about how little sleep we get, how much we procrastinate our assignments, and how little of a social life we have. And if so, I’m left to consider maybe, just maybe, that’s a bad thing.
But first, let me take a step back from that allegation. I hesitate to outright assert that Carnegie Mellon has a problem of students bragging about unhealthy habits. First of all, when we say that we got three hours of sleep or submitted an assignment six minutes before the deadline, it’s usually not because we wanted to suffer the negative consequences of those decisions. And secondly, if I were to tell you not to talk about how little sleep you might get or how much you might procrastinate, that wouldn’t help campus culture. Maybe it would help how we’re seen as a university, but by dishonestly filtering our image, not by making genuine fixes. And I simply don’t find telling people to hide their struggles acceptable. What I may refer to as bragging is often mostly venting, even when it’s the one-upmanship of mentioning how you got even less sleep or procrastinated even more. Yet at the same time, having unhealthy habits normalized like this still isn’t a great sign.
There’s one big question I’ve been avoiding: Are we proud of all the overworking? In other words, are we bragging as opposed to venting? A potentially surprising fun fact is that I’m not omnipresent — my perception is definitely biased by the circles I’m in, so I can’t speak fully as to whether Carnegie Mellon students brag or vent about unhealthy behaviors. But I’d hope we’re not proud of working ourselves to death. It’s definitely possible to be proud of the cool things we all do yet less proud of the personal sacrifices many of us make to do those cool things. As an optimist, I hope it’s possible to continue doing all the cool things we as a university are known to do, yet at the same time lose the prevalence of unhealthy habits.
The only way forward I see that aligns with both honesty and wellbeing is to continue being direct and honest about all the unhealthy and unideal things we do — but also to explicitly acknowledge that five hours of sleep perhaps isn’t enough, and as students, help each other make plans to engage in these unhealthy habits less. If you want to be proud of the cool thing you spent all night making, I suggest being loud and proud. Loud about everything, and proud just about the cool thing, maybe not the fact you were doing it all night.
I’ve seen very few people be genuinely proud of their all- nighters; I’ve seen many more talk about them anyway. I’m going to hope we all would like to have healthy lives and work-life balances. So the next time you’re about to humble your friend who got five hours of sleep by telling of your all-nighter, go ahead. But don’t invalidate that even five hours of sleep is too little, and do try to talk about what got you into that situation and what might prevent similar sleepless nights in the future. It’s a little bit of good we can do for each other.
And also, there’s one more important ingredient: Don’t just talk about how little sleep you get and how behind you are on everything. When it’s true, I’d suggest talking also about how well you’ve been sleeping and how ahead you are, naturally being careful to not oversell yourself or induce imposter syndrome in anybody else. The idea isn’t that people who can handle Carnegie Mellon while maintaining a healthy lifestyle are superhuman; rather, they’re just humans who prioritize wellbeing and do it well. And also, there’s not a clean divide between, for instance, students who get enough sleep and those who don’t; most of us have our good nights and our bad nights. If we’re going to share our bad nights, let’s also share the good ones.
Nobody wants to hear about the building that didn’t burn down, right? Wrong. I want to hear about it, and I think campus culture would benefit from everybody hearing about it. Simply put, unhealthy sleep schedules and similar issues are normal at this university. They’re always going to be somewhat normalized so long as they’re normal. So at the very least, let’s also normalize healthy habits and lifestyles.