Stayin' Awake

“This is it. I’m going to die if I don’t go to sleep.”

Across the room, the screen of my iMac went black as the machine went to sleep, mocking me.

I groaned and rolled over, finally in bed, fully delirious after over 40 hours without sleep, fighting the jitters. I tried to count how many cups of coffee I’d drunk, how many unfiltered Lucky Strikes I’d smoked finishing my finals essays, but my counting was drowned out by my spastic heartbeat.

I woke up the next afternoon, feeling like I’d been hit by a truck.

I parked myself in front of my computer I poured myself a cup of coffee. I felt like crap, but I was pretty much used to that by now. This was no isolated incident. I slapped my stack of notes down on my desk and cracked my knuckles in preparation for battle.

“All right. Let’s see if we can do this again.”

Give Me Coffee and TV
Coffee is the most conventional study aid – it’s been around for centuries, it’s legal and it usually tastes good. As a barista at the campus coffee house, I spent a lot time serving up four-shot lattes to bug-eyed studiers at 11 pm after they’d collapsed on the counter begging for the most caffeinated drink available.

The caffeine in coffee works by altering brain chemistry — it inhibits adenosine, a biochemical compound that induces sleep. Basically, it keeps you from the feeling the sleepiness you would normally feel at bedtime.

“I would actually chew coffee beans,” says Brent Schaeffer, an MFA student at EWU Riverpoint, referring to his undergraduate experience. “It keeps you awake, but your little heart freaks out when you eat [coffee].” He swears, however, that eating the beans helped him get the caffeine into his bloodstream faster.

The downside to drinking coffee? Students in the Whitworth bookstore laugh when I ask them. They all agree: “The runs.”

Drinking too much coffee can also make you restless and irritable (which is great when you’re trying to finish work, right?). Long-term use or heavy consumption of caffeine can lead to withdrawal headaches and insomnia. So remember the cautionary tale of French author Honorè de Balzac, who is rumored to have been the only person to have died from consuming too much caffeine. He weakened his heart after years of drinking copious amounts of black coffee and eating coffee beans.

Wings and Things
On nights when coffee simply wasn’t cutting it, I combated fatigue by chugging a few Red Bulls. Iris Wu, a political science major at Whitworth in her junior year, cites “loads” of sugar-free Red Bull as a crowd favorite.

Most energy drinks work because, like coffee, they contain caffeine. Guarana, an ingredient in many of them, is also a source of caffeine. Energy drinks usually contain vitamins (especially B vitamins, which are supposed to boost metabolism and energy), ginseng, and often taurine or acai.

Perhaps it’s all the vitamins, but energy drinks tend to make me more alert than when I drink coffee. The crash after drinking two or more energy drinks is brutal, though — exhaustion and sometimes headaches or jitters.

As with coffee, overuse of energy drinks can make you grumpy. Because energy drinks contain a lot of caffeine and sugar, drinking one too many in succession can accelerate your heart rate and then cause it to lower drastically as the effects of the drink wear off. In one such case, reported by the Arizona Republic in April, a high school senior named Mathias Claw actually collapsed. Then he spent four days in the hospital.

ADD Comes in Handy
For people who really want to focus, there’s a pill for that — usually Adderall or Ritalin, typically used to treat ADD and ADHD. You need  a prescription to get them, but as adolescent psychiatrist Dr. Lynne Williams reports, they are often “diverted” — filtered through family members and friends.

“Adderall’s a big one,” says Wu, speaking for herself and other students at Whitworth. For her, an added bonus to the focus power is lack of hunger.

Aside from being technically illegal for non-prescription holders, the drugs are somewhat controversial, with some saying that students without ADD who use Adderall and Ritalin are the equivalent of athletes who use performance-enhancing drugs. “It’s basically legal speed,” says Dr. Williams. “The evidence suggests that it helps you focus to get your work done. It’s like the equivalent of four cups of coffee: You get the same edge. But it’s hyper-focus. It’s not natural.”

Along with irritability, using these drugs when you don’t need them can lead to paranoia. (Tin foil hats, anyone?) In rare cases, using too much Adderall can lead to heart attacks or seizures.

Considering all the evidence, it may be best to just take a deep breath and short nap before chugging yet another round of pills and stimulants.