Sleep

I was raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, also known as the Mormons. There are many things that are unique to being a member of that religion, but today I am only going to comment on one, no coffee.

Mormon's have many rituals, but one is that they do not drink certain drinks or rather they would say that they abstain from partaking some things. Coffee is on the list of banned drinks. This means that until I had graduated college, I had never tried coffee. My family took it a step further in that we also didn't drink any caffeinated drinks. This means that I didn't have any aids to wake up in the morning. For many years of my life, I would get a solid 8 hours of sleep and then be just fine in the morning.

Now, my life has changed quite a bit. I require black out curtains, silence, and air conditioning around 22 degrees Celsius. I also normally have a coffee in the morning. I can get by on less sleep and probably average only around 6 hours a night. As I get older this is a trend that I do not mind as it gives me more time in the day to function, and the coffee takes care of the rest. I do take at least once a year to make sure that I am not dependent on coffee. Learning that I could function that way was a major life change and discovery that I wished I had done earlier as it would have changed my college experience.