How much sleep to get

Because I live very far away from my sixth form, I need to wake up super early to actually get into college, and it takes forever to get there and back, which is contrast to all of my prior education which as been 5 minutes away. The issue with this is that my conventional strategy of "Spam as much revision as possible" does not work, as working late hours has meant that most nights I sleep around 5 and a bit hours, and in the worst cases, 3 hours to study and do everything I want to do. The obvious issue with this is that I am dead during exams, so have not gotten the predicted grades I need for where I want to be (Want to do maths at Cambridge, need A*A*AA minimum and got just a little less than that in my predicted grades). I feel as though a little more sleep could help, but I am stressing that if I do that, I get less revision, and I am really scared I will not do well if I do that. I currently wake up 6:00, get ready quickly, get to school at 9:00 and get back at about 17:00, then revise to about 00:30 to 01:00 and try and sleep but because I have insomnia the amount of sleep I get can vary, but I can feel it draining me, and I can tell my brain is not performing as it once did at high school, but I am worried that by sleeping more, it is just me being lazy, and I will not get where I want to be and I will fail and I am so scared that either way I go, I will fail. Does anybody have any advice?

Reply 1

Emmmaaaa...

Its definitely not healthy to revise till 1 every night - if you get more sleep, you'll find you can concentrate better and the quality of revising is better, so you'll need to revise less. Could you revise on the way into sixth form, if it takes so long? Additionally, its a common misconception that you need 4 a levels for Cambridge, which are often not needed. They prefer you to focus on supercurriculars, and getting top grades in 3 a levels.