Stress is part of our lives at Uni, and in life in general. We are usually teetering on the edge of sanity, one step away from an emotional breakdown at any time. But where do we get this stress from? It seems like we get it from work and expectations we and others set for ourselves. Every time one task is completed, two more rush in to fill its place. We are always being weighed down by things we have to do. We are all so busy, and it seems like we never get a minute to just breathe and relax. Even as I’m writing this I feel like I haven’t taken a mental break in a while. I wonder why we are all so over-scheduled and high-strung all the time. I think that part of the issue is that there is the absurd idea at Uni that in order to be an impressive student and college applicant, you have to drive yourself nuts with a huge quantity of work and a severe lack of free time. Unfortunately, I have bought into that, even if just for the reason that I can’t say no to an extra-curricular that I enjoy or am passionate about, so they just keep piling up. Every time I have to drop an extra-curricular from my life, I procrastinate too long on telling the person in charge so that I can change my mind at the last minute if I want to, which I often do. This results in too many big time commitments combining into a 12-hour day of busyness before homework can even start. The time goes down and the stress goes up, like in the Atwood machines we learned about in physics, except in this case one side goes up more than the other goes down.
How do we address the stress we feel from school and extracurriculars? To be honest, I feel like we don’t really address it. One popular strategy is to complain about it to each other (which is easy cause we’re all experiencing the same thing) and then go back to all the work waiting to be done. This doesn’t actually relieve stress. It just makes us more high-strung because in order to put the stress into words, we have to conceptualize the roots of it, making us freak out more. The other popular strategy is to procrastinate. We have a tendency to fight the smaller and nearer battles first, ignoring the big battles until they catch us off-guard when it is almost too late. This also increases our stress because it just makes everything hang over our heads more heavily and for longer than necessary. Because of our flawed strategies, the stress increases in an exponential pattern.
Where this blog post begins to seem “meta” is when I mention that this particular blog post has caused me stress because it had added to all the other things I need to do by tonight, however small each one might be, such that I am now overwhelmed by my to-do list for this evening. As I'm writing this, there is a actually a to-do list sitting on the table next to me with not enough things crossed off of it. This is caused by my procrastination and an attempt to get enough sleep earlier in the week, jeopardizing my sleep now. I think that the stress I have is only multiplied when college applications and everything pertaining to that comes into the equation because there are so many things that need to get done in that realm and so little time to do them. The nice thing is, just as with homework- and extracurricular-related stress, college app-related stress is something all of my classmates can understand. At Uni, just like we are shoved into over-using "smart" for silly reasons, we are forced to over-work ourselves and test the limits of our own sanity.
You put this in better words than I could have. I really liked your post and related to it.
ReplyDeleteI'll try to keep this short, so you won't lose more sleep to read this.
ReplyDeleteYou summed up well what stress is like at Uni, and why it happens. The fact that a 'good' Uni student has close to no free time due to loading on so many extracurriculars is a really good point to make, which I hope some of us can break out of (which is pretty unlikely at this point). I completely relate to nearly everything in the post.
I agree with both the title and the post. The part where you mentioned that we don't really address stress is something I find to be very true. What I liked about your post was that it was very relatable. I felt like it was an honest depiction and it worked well.
ReplyDeleteI think that the Uni's culture of pushing one's limits mentally and academically is interestingly often the best and worst aspect of our school. Often I forget why I applied to Uni in the first place, namely because I didn't need to push myself at all in Edison Middle School, coasting through classes. Initially, Uni's intense atmosphere was a welcome change, but I think that as I got older it began to take a toll on me. In my opinion, Uni's high expectation is a case of "the grass is greener on the other side," and ultimately its one of the school's defining feature, for the better or worse.
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