As the first six weeks is coming to an end, there seems to be an almost immediate correlation between homework and sleep: the more homework all of your teachers assign, the less hours of sleep you get.

Eventually it comes to a rite of passage, pulling an all-nighter. If you don’t get around to it in high school, that is a good thing, but it’s probably because you are well organized and able to manage your time. Don’t worry though, you still have college to look forward to.

Now, there is an art to the all-nighter. Sometimes it doesn’t require staying awake the entire night. You can go to bed at a reasonable time, hopefully that means by 10 p.m. at the latest, and wake up at 3 a.m. I consider that a nice nap. Then, you just work on your assignments until it’s time to get ready for school.

Other times, when you realize that there is no way you can go to sleep with all that homework or a test or project due the next day, you have to make a decision to sacrifice something. I don’t know about you, but my sleep almost always comes second to my grades. That sounds really unhealthy when I say that out loud.

Either way you choose to mess up your sleep schedule, I guarantee you will feel like a zombie at school the next day. It can go two ways for me.

The first half of the day, I may be hyper and energized. This usually lasts until sixth period when my body realizes it hasn’t slept for over 24 hours and I crash. Hard. The alternative to this is just feeling awful the entire day until I pass out on my bed as soon as I get home.

I admit it is easy to get caught up in a bad sleep schedule. You pull an all-nighter one night leading you to sleep all day when you get home after school and then you wake up late that night with a ton of things to do. It’s one endless, sleepless cycle. Unfortunately, it is still a habit that I’m trying to break.

The truth is all-nighters are not healthy for your body. Eventually, the lack of sleep will catch up to you, and you will feel miserable. Sleep deprivation can stunt your growth, as well as result in bad grades for the very assignments you stayed up for.

It’s best just to plan so you can get everything done in time. If that means turning off your phone or limiting your social outings to once a week, so be it. Remember, doctors recommend that as developing teenagers we need seven to nine hours of sleep so you can at least settle for five.