<p>Full disclosure: Long post from a parent, simply because I identify with several issues in your OP.</p>
<p>A few suggestions, based on my own kid’s college experience switching rooms midyear, plus some professional help I’m now getting on what the doctors call sleep hygiene, and my awareness of mobility limitations and the social impact of same.</p>
<p>ROOMMATE SWITCH:
a. This might be accomplished even sooner if you can identify someone who wants to switch with you to the housing office. It makes their job easier. It shouldn’t have to be, but it helps grease the wheels sometimes. Since your roommate is not problematic, and you have every good reason to want to move closer in, it’d be clear to anyone you’re not trying to ditch a bad roommate here.</p>
<p>b. Just be careful not to get saddled with someone else’s bad/toxic roommate closer in!</p>
<p>c. Maybe your current roommate can work with you if he knows someone he’d really like to live with, who has a decent roommate already who could become your roommate next. If all 4 of you are in agreement, there should be no obstacle to the housing people to make a fast switch.</p>
<p>SLEEP: I’ll pass that professional dr’s advice on sleep to all reading for free. It’s research and advice from a top sleep specialist/neurologist that I see, FWIW. The following items have been identified to me as the most important variables to improve sleep regularity, which LEADS to sleep quality:</p>
<p>a. Going to sleep: In the hour before you want to go to sleep stay off of: computers, TV screens, bright lights. Instead, read for an hour with the bright light behind your head. Why? Our bodies are programmed (long before electricity intruded itself onto our species!) to interpret semi-darkness as sunset. Then HORMONES are released that induce sleep within the hour. </p>
<p>An hour before bedtime: Don’t look at computer/TV screens, bright lights, street lamps coming through windows, etc. Even staring at the electric dial on your alarm clock as you try to fall asleep is a mistake. Why? Different hormones are triggered by any bright light, and released into your body, screaming: “WAKE UP, it’s a sunrise!” So, for the next 2 hours your poor body thinks it’s supposed to rally awake, even at 1 a.m. A lot of colege students today were home-socialized to stare at computer or TV immediately before bed. This is truly unfortunate. You have to change this life pattern yourself, but it’s easily in your control. You may need to reorganize your environment around you to let sleep come to you.</p>
<p>b. Waking up: THE Most important thing to establish is a consistent wake-up time. This is hard, because it’s soo nice to take a break and sleep in when there are no morning classes. Be tough on yourself and make yourself wake up the same time each morning, even on weekends, based on your earliest class of the week. (I know, you hate me now.)</p>
<p>What this does is push your body to realize it has to go to sleep the next night because you’ll be making youir feet hit the ground the next morning, no matter what kind of sleep you get.</p>
<p>c. At first: You might/will have a bad day or two over this, because you have to wake up like this even after a crummy night’s sleep. Then - this is key - push through that day. Do anything but nap to catch up that same day. Guaranteed that will cause you to be very tired at the right time and you’ll crash to sleep when you want to at night. It’s better to have the bad day then than stay up all night or around the clock, because that’ll wreck your sleep for several days following. Summary: consistent wake-up time, come what may, is key to establishing a consistent ability to fall asleep that same night and every night. </p>
<p>d. Be patient and disciplined: It can take up to a month to establish a healthy sleep hygiene pattern, and your first week won’t be a cakewalk, either. But it’s better than what’s occurring now.</p>
<p>e. When things don’t work: At night, if you find you can’t fall asleep after around 10-15 minutes, don’t stay in bed to toss and turn; rather go elsewhere and read something STUPID and DULL with a light behind your head. Not coursework, just a crossword puzzle or something akin to Readers Digest/People Magazine. Really dumb stuff. Try to find a different quiet space than your own room where you can put a light behind your head (student lounge?). It will bore you and you’ll start to feel tired; and that’s when to crawl back into the quiet dark room you’ve established and fall asleep again. What you’ve done is establish a Pavlovian behavioral response that when you get into that bed in a very dark room, you have programmed your body to fall quickly to sleep therre. That’s why to not stay in bed, tossing and turning beyond 15 min. You train your body to associate your bed with sleep and comfort, not anxiety and toss/turning. Woof - just like Pavlov’s dogs. </p>
<p>f. Darkness with a roommate: If you share a double space, I guess a sleep mask is helpful right here in case your roommate(s) still need to keep on their bright screen. (Note; it’s the light, not just the noise, that interferes with the hormone releases at the correct time you want to sleep or wake.)</p>
<p>g. Plus, everything said above helps sleep, too: warm milk, banana at night… run in the morning, it’s all consistent. The run in the morning may not be viable for you but you can and should stare out the window as soon as you wake up for the day. Let that bright light get into your eyes and brain, screaming: “OK, caveman, it’s Sunrise! Wake up!”</p>
<p>h. The role of medications: I’ve been recommended to work first on the sleep pattern and then add the Melatonin and other pill solutions in addition. If you try to manage yourself on pills only, it can be kind of a chase around the clock. Sleep architecture, consistently, will give you more control over your body and help permit some episodes of REM sleep (the truly refreshing deep-sleep stage). So first try to correct your sleep schedule, and if still needed, add on the pills. YMMV, but I’m told that pills alone won’t give you the foundation you truly need here. </p>
<p>DISABILITY/WALKING: Adding that I also have a mobility disability and am extremely sympathetic to the issues you describe about the bus, distances, and how that all plays into the development of friends on your new campus.</p>
<h1>Your peers are telling you to break it down and solve each piece of the puzzle. That is something you can do. YES, be in the face of the disabilities office; squeaky wheel and all that. It’s terrible you are roomed at a distance with a mobility disability. 
Even go to Dean of Students if necessary to shake up the bureaucracy on this aspect. He/she might even overturn something that the housing person sees as an obstacle to a fast resolution. Work up the line of authority, check in at every point, but if someone says “no” then find out who can say “yes.” </h1>
<p>Forgive my long post here, I just care a lot to see students, especially those transferring in, find the college experience they so richly deserve! Best wishes.</p>
As of right now I’m considering dropping one of my courses, the 8 a.m. one to be specific. Not just because of the early morning 5 day classes but because I’m having trouble balancing it with my other classes and dealing with the subject (Italian I) which a lot of people would find easy but I’m struggling with for some reason. I think part of the problem I’m having aside from the sleep problem and the housing situation is that I loaded myself up too much. Right now I’m taking 2 classes for my major, 1 for my minor and trying to learn a language. Maybe it was a bit much for my first semester at a university on my own.</p>