Lydia Chapman
Senior Reporter
On a gray Tuesday afternoon, Zackary VandenBosch wakes up in a panic.
For a moment, he’s sure he’s slept through class. His heart is pounding, the room looks wrong, and outside his window it’s already pitch black. The clock on his laptop reads 5:30 p.m., but after a post time change nap, it feels like 2 a.m.
“I thought I’d slept like six hours,” he says, laughing. “I got on my computer and started trying to do an assignment. Then I looked down and realized it had only been an hour and a half.”
For the senior nursing major and RA, naps like these aren’t indulgences, they’re a survival strategy. VandenBosch naps almost every day, usually for an hour or two, squeezed somewhere between early-morning clinicals, late-night RA duties, and the whirl of a senior-year workload.
“My sleep schedule is inconsistent on a good week,” he said.
Some days begin at 6 a.m. at the hospital. Some nights stretch past 11 with RA meetings or emergencies. By the time his head hits the pillow, he’s already mentally penciled in a nap for the next afternoon.
“Napping is my self-care,” he said. “If I don’t nap, I feel like I’m just trying not to fall asleep while I’m doing homework.”
Walk through Benson on any afternoon, and one might spot a student curled up, sometimes intentionally, sometimes in an accidental slump, on a couch. Cafeteria chairs, hammocks, hallway floors, and the occasional classroom have become makeshift napping stations. College students have always been tired, but increasingly, they talk about naps the way they talk about coffee: essential, expected, and part of the identity of being a student.
Trevecca is no exception.
Unlike VandenBosch, senior creative writing major Kat Abraham doesn’t nap every day. She tries not to. She prefers a full night’s sleep. But sometimes she just doesn’t have a choice.
“If I didn’t sleep well the night before, or if there’s too much going on, I’ll take a long nap just to ignore the world for a little while,” she says.
Her naps are irregular: short twenty-minute resets on good days or two to three-hour marathon naps when stress piles too high. The longer naps often leave her foggy and disoriented, but she still finds herself needing them during overwhelming weeks.
Abraham admits her biggest struggle isn’t napping, it’s routine. She ends most nights scrolling, knows she drinks too much caffeine, and stays up later than she wants “either to unwind or to get work done.”
“Sleep feels optional here,” she said. “Some people take it seriously. Others are like, ‘I can sleep when I have time.’ It really depends.”
Even when she tries, consistency is hard. She joked that if she doesn’t have a reason to get up early, “I just don’t make the time”. A sentiment familiar to many students juggling class schedules, social plans, and midnight assignments.
According to university clinician Charly Taylor, students rarely come in complaining about sleep itself.
Instead, they bring stress, irritability, trouble concentrating, or emotional overload, and sleep quietly sits at the root of those struggles.
“Fatigue, daytime sleepiness, muscle tension, and snapping at people are often tied to not getting deep, restful sleep,” she said. “Your brain doesn’t get enough time to self-heal.”
Taylor sees several patterns contributing to campus-wide exhaustion:
- pressure to overcommit
- FOMO and late-night socializing
- scrolling habits and blue-light exposure
- caffeine masking fatigue
- unpredictable academic schedules
- roommates and communal living
- beds doubling as couches and desks
One of the biggest misconceptions she sees is the assumption that naps always help.
“Some people can take naps and some people can’t,” Taylor said. “You have to learn that in yourself. Can you truly afford this nap, or is it going to impede good sleep later?”
She emphasizes the importance of bedtime cues. Small, consistent habits that tell the brain and body the day is done.
“What are two or three things you can do every night to wind down? That could be washing your face, drinking tea, or moisturizing. Anything that sets a rhythm,” she said.
Her number one rule for sleep hygiene is simple: protect the bed.
“The only time you should ever get in your bed is when you’re going to sleep,” she said. “That bed is truly a haven for sleep.”
VandenBosch encounters a similar pattern as an RA: students comparing exhaustion like it’s a competition.
“I hear people say, ‘You got six hours? I only got four,’” he said. “It’s definitely a badge of honor sometimes.”
Caffeine makes things worse. Even with a stimulant prescription for ADHD, he admits caffeine doesn’t energize him. It sometimes makes him more tired.
“If anything, I want a nap more after caffeine,” he said.
His naps, unlike Abraham’s, are predictable. He doesn’t usually set an alarm, he crashes wherever he is and hopes for the best. He’s slept in hammocks, on couches, and once even against a wall outside a gas station.
“I can fall asleep anywhere,” he said. “Throw me in a rainstorm and I’d still fall asleep.”
But no matter where he naps, the result is the same: he shows up more fully afterward.
“On days I don’t nap, I’m slower, I’m quieter, I’m just exhausted,” he said. “You can definitely tell.”
For Taylor, the biggest message she wants students to understand is that rest is not a luxury.
“You are important for who you are and not what you produce,” she said. “You are still valuable when you pause to rest.”
She hopes students will pay attention not only to how much they sleep, but to how they sleep, what they do before bed, where they rest, what cues their bodies respond to, and whether their naps are restorative or disrupt their nighttime routine.
“Even if you haven’t made great choices about sleep before today,” she said, “it’s never too late to make good, healthy routines.”
One of VandenBosch’s favorite places to nap isn’t glamorous. It’s the lower Benson lobby. home to the infamous six-hour laundry nap. He laughs about it now, but he also knows how often exhaustion pushes students past their limits.
“I wish everyone would just go to bed at a good time,” he said. “Especially as an RA, I see people awake at 2 or 3 a.m. for no reason. Go to sleep. You need it.”
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