When, at the beginning of my second year, I started having fainting spells and the doctors couldn’t find any physical reason for them, it occurred to me that my life might be out of balance.

So I cut down on alcohol — and later, to my astonishment, caffeine. I started hiking, doing yoga, and swimming in the ocean. I learned to manage my time well enough to stop studying shortly after sundown every night. For a brief time, I even allowed the most pernicious of all Southern California contagions to infect me: veganism.