sleep and stress

So this week has been stressful I must admit. I am looking around and I see it’s not just me who’s feeling the semester starting to get into full swing. It has been four weeks and yes I’m getting into the groove of things because I realized after a couple of weeks of cutting it close, I needed to make the necessary adjustments or else the semester will not turn out the way I’d like it to.
I think I can see the effects of all the things I am stressing over physically. For instance, I am seeing laugh lines around my mouth which I thought were not supposed to appear until I was in my late twenties or early thirties according to the women I hear complaining on Oprah all of the time. I think it’s the lack of sleep though mostly. I have read in various places that sleep deprivation accelerates the aging process and just recently I learned that it also may factor into increasing the severity of a number of common ailments in old age. I heard O.B./Gyn. on Oprah say once that lack of sleep changes the way your body metabolizes foods and that was when it clicked for me. I understood the links between food, sleep and functioning at least somewhat. It's all interrelated and sleep is like the physiological cornerstone. I need to sleep better and that's the point I'm driving at. A friend of mine put it in perspective when she admitted that she had fallen asleep in the library before class. I think that's just a sign you're pushing yourself a little too hard and you need some sleep, some time to rejuvenate yourself. But she realized it herself and said she was going to go home and take some downtime for herself. It's just finding a balance between work, play and sleep-duh right? No, actually I think we all understand that on some level, knowing that life needs balance is common sense but achieving that balance is what I think gets most of us. So maybe I should go work on striking my balance and get some rest huh? Haha. I'm a piece of work-stressing about stress!