Every all-nighter begins the same way: underestimation.

It’s 7:00 PM. We open up Microsoft Word and write the title of the paper due the next day. We stare at the computer screen, marveling at our progress. “This is going to be a cake walk!” we always say. After writing an introductory sentence, it feels like we’re halfway done—so of course it is time to reward ourselves by checking what’s out there on the waves—Facebook, Twitter, and any other online nonsense that we all seemingly cannot live without.

It’s 11:00 PM. We now have fifteen tabs open in our Web Browser, along with an iTunes playlist of distracting songs that we supposedly started playing to help us “concentrate better”.

It’s 2:00 AM. We’ve now had an ice cream break, an iPhone Facetime session, and are about to watch our twenty-seventh video of a cat dancing to Gangnam Style. It’s time for bed. Wait a minute, what is this word document minimized? This paper can’t possibly be due tomorrow. So unfair. Instead of getting back to writing it, we do the next best thing: making sure we have other miserable company losing sleep with us too. “This assignment is the worst,” or “I can’t believe they would do this to us,” or “I haven’t slept since 2003”, we text our friends. But we all know the truth: the perpetrator is ourselves.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for us to cut ties to our awful habits of procrastination and lying to ourselves and break free from the chains and strains upon which sleepless nights anchor us. It is unjust and cruel to let our lack of sleep take over who we are, affect our relationships with others, and mess with our health and mental well-being. This is why I am writing my own Declaration of Independence for the rest of the world to see and understand I should be and will be independent of my endless sleepless nights.

These truths are to be self-evident: all men are created equal, they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among which are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of a good night’s sleep. If the pursuit of a good night’s sleep is part of our “unalienable rights”, then why do we allow our procrastination to take over control of our lives and prevent us from getting the satisfaction we deserve?

Why do we leave our homework until 11:00pm? “We work better under pressure,” we lie to ourselves.

Why do we leave a project we were assigned a month ago for the last day? “We’ll get smarter each day we procrastinate,” we nonsensically argue.

We are extremely mistaken for not taking a lack of sleep seriously. A lack of sleep can:
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Limit your ability to learn, listen, concentrate and solve problems. You may even forget important information like names, numbers, your homework or a date with a special person in your life;
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Make you more prone to pimples. Lack of sleep can contribute to acne and other skin problems
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Lead to aggressive or inappropriate behavior such as yelling at your friends or being impatient with your teachers or family members;
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Losing Sleep Can Make You Gain Weight (not exactly anyone’s New Year’s resolution)

According to a recent poll distributed by the National Sleep Foundation, only 20 percent of teens worldwide get the recommended nine hours of shuteye on school nights. 28 percent of high school students said they fell asleep in class at least once a week. 22 percent dozed off while doing homework. 14 percent arrive late or miss school because they oversleep. More than one-quarter (28 percent) of adolescents say they're too tired to exercise. In contrast, eighty percent of students who get the recommended amount of sleep are achieving As and Bs in school, while those who get less sleep are more likely to get lower grades.

But we know all of this. We are very well aware of what we are doing to our bodies and the dangers we are putting ourselves into, not to mention that the amount of hours we put off our essays has in inverse relationship with the grades we get on them. We have tried to make agreements and promises with ourselves to make to-do lists or promise to do homework as soon as we got home. These resolutions, however, were never kept and we always reverted to our old ways. We must now announce that we are separating ourselves from these bad habits and becoming independent of our sleepless nights.

Therefore, I solemnly write and declare myself free and independent of
my all-nighters. I pledge to not put off assignments to the last minute and not waste time doing things instead of my schoolwork. And for the support of this Declaration, and with a firm reliance on the protection of my internal clock, I pledge my life, REM stages, and every hour of shuteye I have!