Tips on staying awake for longer periods of time&proper rest?

Your plan is stupid. Especially if you are young you should sleep a minimum of 7 hours per day. Adapt your schedule and fix your priorities but the solution is not to sleep less. Otherwise: cocaine probably.

Fix lack of planning first, don't sacrifice your sleep time.

Sacrificing sleep time will affect your cognitive performance and increase risk for a lot of diseases. "There simply isn't time" is usually an excuse used when you have poor time management skills, you can try an exercise of writing down what activity you have done each hour segment. This will allow you to be mindful on which activities are wasting your time.

Polyphasic sleep schedules are also not recommended, Huberman has a good episode on sleep w/ Matthew Walker: https://youtu.be/gbQFSMayJxk

Not that I'd recommend doing this, but back when I was younger, I had the not so bright idea that I could go to work come home, game the whole night, then go back to work. It was a terrible idea in hindsight, but I used to it a lot. To achieve this, I used to mix energy drinks and pre-workout to stay awake, and I'd drink it as though I was drinking water, so I ended up drinking a butt load. I just want to stress again though that I'd never recommend actually doing this though unless as a last resort, but even then I'd caution away from it. I get there are times when one feels they absolutely must stay awake, God knows the amount of times I accidentally slept through something, and ruined relationships, but as others have said planning is probably the issue you're facing.

When I was studying a lot, I would just slowly eat saltine crackers. Most adults can't fall asleep while eating.

I had a very intense year of school one year and I gained some weight because of this method. Everything has a consequence.

If you're going to go without sleep, try a power nap here or there to help.

The tip should be to not do this.

After a certain amount of time, you're not going to be retaining much of that information anyway.

I used to be like you. Young and wild, being a night owl living in a world ruled by daywalkers.

Nowadays, I tend to value even an hour of sleep over staying up the whole night. You always feel better after sleep and even a little bit is better than none.

For staying up, I recommend coffee or chocolate-covered espresso beans (very easy to over-do it on these).

For waking up after only a short amount of sleep, set multiple alarms about 3-5 mins apart for about 45 mins. If you use your phone as an alarm, put your phone in an empty coffee mug to help amplify the sounds and vibrations of the alarm. There’s no guilt worse than over-sleeping when someone is relying on you.

Have to echo a lot of folks here, OP. Do this every rare once in a while, and someone will probably be okay. Do this all the time as a habit or regular thing, and not so much.

The health impacts of regularly not allowing your body its normal allotment of sleep are known and dangerous. Would not recommend.

Ditto on all the other health and safety advice. Also, please, please, please do not drive or put yourself in a position where you could harm others (like operating heavy machinery).

Then, lights. Turn them all on. Everywhere. Full brightness. Probably close the shades so you can't see that it's nighttime. On a computer? Bright monitor / screen. Turn off dark mode. Also, move around a lot. Walk. Jump. Finally, make it cold. Really cold. Think t-shirt and shorts in a Siberian spring. Not blue fingers cold. Not shivering, just uncomfortable.

Okay so I had major issues with sleep for a long time, staying up until 4am and sleeping until 1pm (or worse) was frequently an issue I dealt with. It takes a bit of work to get out of this, and a bit of suffering, but if I can do it then you certainly can.

Turn on Night Shift (or whatever Android equivalent there is) for 9pm. This helps a lot.

Read. I don’t care how much you hate it, find something awesome to read and start reading an hour before you want to go to bed. Read in bed. Just do it. Your brain will thank you and you’ll get smarter.

Set your alarm for 8am. Just get up, no matter how tired you are just fucking do it. Your mental health is at stake.

Limit your napping to no more than 20 mins. At 30 mins you will push your circadian rhythm out further every minute you’re awake and that’s how much longer you’ll stay up every night. 20 min isn’t long enough to hit REM in the middle of the day, which will kill your day completely. Set a nap alarm and wake up.

Don’t eat after 6pm. Stop doing it. Your mental health is at stake.

After doing those things for two weeks, set your alarm for 7am, do that for two weeks, then 6am. You now have a full 16 hour day cycle with no sleeping in the middle. You’ll get good rest every night by being up so long during the day.