College students, especially now, face overwhelming trouble in balancing healthy lifestyle choices with their academics. Sleep is by far one of the most impacted candidates.

Statistics on sleep in college students
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5536318/

• Between classes, assignments, socializing, caffeinating, drinking, studying, technology, outside jobs, and even finding time to eat, college students in particular are often drowning themselves and creating the inevitability of devaluing sleep.
• As a student with a large workload, I have immense trouble balancing it all, let alone in conjunction with all other factors of my life. I’ve depended on caffeine. I’ve studied for several hours at a time. I’ve slept 3 hours one night and 12 the next. I’ve gone weeks without seeing friends and then spent an entire weekend socializing.

Real interview(s) : is sleep a luxury?
https://www.sleephealthjournal.org/article/S2352-7218(14)00011-4/pdf

Sleep deprivation is a problem for me and several of my friends.  On the other hand, some students even oversleep as a coping mechanism or as a result of underlying health issues, but oversleeping has a great impact on the life of a college student as well.  Either way, it’s easy to let proper sleep and health fall to the back of the priority list, but sleep is extremely important as it affects everything while you’re awake. 

• I decided to create a Picasso-esc painting, portraying students engulfed in their surrounding stresses. The Picasso style was my instinctual choice, perhaps because of the misshapen and unbalanced lifestyle college students lead.
• I exaggerated the physical aspects of a bad sleep schedule (eye-bags, cool-tone skin to represent sickly mood, etc), as well as incorporated elements of how the student(s) got there (coffee, book, calendar with deadlines, etc).

Perhaps this isn’t the happiest piece of artwork, but it forced me to do some self-reflection. I hope it will also be meaningful to my peers, as I’m sure some may relate to the issue I’m presenting.