Following on from my somewhat controversial article on the sunshine of socialism last week, I thought that this week, I’d write about another kind of sunshine (or specifically, the lack thereof).

It has been nicknamed the ‘curse of the student’. All those lonely nights locked away in the library, with nothing but a copy of Hobbes’s Leviathan to hold in your arms, the life of a student is so often ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ You try to keep your eyes open, your head slumped across your stooped shoulders, your nose getting ever closer to the page in front as you gently fall into a light slumber. It is only 7pm. Your friends seem chirpy, perhaps annoyingly so, as you struggle to string a sentence together. And your body hurts. You feel defeated. The Leviathan has conquered you.

Or so you thought. Until you discovered that you are actually severely Vitamin D deprived (yay! In yo face, Hobbes! You shall be mastered yet!).

Sound familiar? Well, it certainly does to me.

"Your best revision tool is your body, and if it’s not functioning properly then you are only setting yourself up for failure"

At the end of last term, I found out that I had a severe Vitamin D deficiency. When I first heard, I thought it was ridiculous. "I spend enough time in the sun!" was my first reaction – a statement I later retracted when I failed to recall the last time I had actually sat in the sun, or let those little beams do their thing. After some research, it became glaringly obvious that I was your archetypal victim for Vitamin D deficiency.

According to the NHS, around one in five people have low levels of Vitamin D in the UK, and its effects can be detrimental. In 2015, nearly 5,000 children admitted to hospital were found to be Vitamin D deficient. The issue is relatively common in universities, with many referring to it as the ‘student blues’ due to its association with anxiety and depression. This little vitamin’s impact upon both mental and physical health is rather remarkable.

I first started to notice that something was wrong when I found myself crying multiple times a day, having to nap maybe three times a day (even after sleeping for 9-10 hours each night) and feeling ill all the time.

Migraines? Check.

Body aching? Check.

Inability to concentrate? MULTIPLE CHECKS (so bad that I struggled to read and write and would just walk around in a confused daze). My overwhelming feeling was just weakness.

I’m on my way to reversing my spat with the sun rays, but I still find it surprising just how much power this little-known vitamin has over my body, and just how little it is talked about within university campuses (campi? What constitutes as being ‘too Cambridge’?). Eight week terms of non-stop work and study seems to lead to an inevitable damaging of students’ mental and physical wellbeing.

Lyrical Lobotomy: Love Song Wank

So, if you’re feeling gloomy, achy or ill, then go and see your college nurse or GP and ask about Vitamin D. Your best revision tool is your body, and if it’s not functioning properly then you are only setting yourself up for failure. It can take months, years even, to reverse the effects of Vitamin D deficiency, so take a chance, make a change (as Kelly Clarkson would advise) and take a revision break. Go for a walk, feel the sun on your face and let those glorious beams nourish your body. Goodbye, curse of the student