Think about it, sleep is a pretty cool thing. You’re lying in bed at night with your eyes closed, and the next thing you know, it's morning. You feel rested, refreshed, ready and able to start your day.

Or maybe you don't. Maybe you lie awake for hours, wishing you could just fall asleep already. Or maybe instead of sleeping soundly all night and waking up in the morning, you keep waking up during the night, and have trouble falling back to sleep. When the alarm finally goes off, you’re dead tired. You feel like a zombie and you just can’t drag yourself out of bed. It’s not because of the math test today that you’d choose to stay home rather than going to school. Your mind and body are both begging you to just stay under the covers and go back to sleep for a few hours. The sleep you got just wasn’t enough.

Throughout the rest of the day you may feel sleepy and drained. You may even fall asleep in class, which may not be too bad (especially during the boring ones!). Just kidding. But what if you became one of the hundreds of people every year who fall asleep while behind the wheel?  That could be one nap you or some other innocent person never wakes up from. 

It’s easy to overlook the importance of sleep. But then again, anything that you do every night, and for a total of about one-third of your entire life, has got to be pretty important.  Otherwise why would you do it so much? 

If the rested and revitalized person in the first paragraph sounds like you, then good for you! You're getting the shut-eye you need to be at your best. But if you're the drowsy, yawning person of the second part of this story, you'd better open your eyes to some of the things you may not know about why and how you should get your nightly ZZZ’s.