We live in a time and place in which stress is something we experience daily. Something which makes us want to cry and kick and throw tantrums which we hadn’t thrown since we were seven. How could we not? It makes sense, our days are filled with deadlines and compromises and expectations we must reach. With AP courses, sports, extracurriculars and so much more the goals we set for ourselves seem unreachable and needless to say, it gets frustrating. When you’re drowning in research papers and information you must absorb and regurgitate its hard to ever find a balance between school and a life. It's as if time ran out on us. That is a terrifying thought, but to be honest, there’s a lot to be done about that and methods that you can follow so that temper tantrums and mental breakdowns don’t happen halfway through a busy week.
Define
Before you go out and buy a fancy planner and a pack of twenty four different colored highlighters, take a moment to define the aspects that make up your life. This can be summed up into 7 categories; health, spirit, social life, entertainment, family, work, and school. Of course, these categories are adaptable and you can change them to fit your lifestyle. But, the main idea of them should remain the same.
Health includes the time you spend practicing for a sport or going to the gym, or eating nutritious meals.
Spirit includes time spent doing hobbies such as dancing or art as well as community service hours and religion based practices.
Social life includes the time you spend with your friends and going out.
Entertainment includes time for leisure and for being on your phone and watching T.V.
Family is obviously the time you spend bonding with family and loved ones.
Work is time spent making money, whether it is for the future or for now.
And, School most importantly, is the time you spend doing homework and studying.
Think about the things you do in your everyday life and place them into these categories. What this does is it makes you realize how well balanced your life is and where your time is going. This might be a shocking activity to many as often it is surprising to find out you don’t spend much time doing community service or hanging out with siblings. It’s a reality check if you want to put it that way. And it will help in limiting the frustration you feel when you’ve been working on something for too long because you’ll be able to differentiate between what fits into the category or not. It will help in being able to pinpoint what is stressful and what to add or decrease in order to fix it.
Prioritize
Now that you know what might be causing mental breakdowns, prioritize your activities. Not only between the categories but the tasks within them. For example, if you know you have a test coming up at the end of the week make it the first thing you think about throughout so that when the time comes to take it, you won’t regret spending time making a complicated recipe or going to the gym instead of studying. Come to terms with the idea that you don’t even have to replace one beneficial thing with another if you organize yourself well enough. Yes it may seem like you do when you are faced with a time in which you either do MathXl or go to the party. But think on the long term. Not doing MathXl will give you a Z which will lower your grade which will probably result in grounding and no time with friends. Doing MathXl means 45 minutes tops of working, maybe getting to the party a little late, an A and more time to see friends later. So, think about what is more important to you, then, think about it again, on the long term this time. A big part of the time frustration comes from the idea that everything is equally important and that we can’t fit it all into one day. But, we can. If we choose one thing over the other and work things out so that we can do the second choice later it’ll lower the to do list and therefore the panic as well.
If you don’t know how to do this, prioritize based on due date and importance. For instance, if there is a small homework assignment due tomorrow but a big project due until Friday, the project is worth more. Do a little bit of that before and leave the assignment until after you are done with a little section of the project. In the end, you turned in the homework assignment and did the project little by little.
Think and Work Ahead of Time
I briefly went over this before, but doing things ahead of time and thinking on the long term is really key in organizing yourself. Getting things out of the way before the due date is one of the best ways to avoid stress. Not only will information be fresh in your mind but you will save yourself the panic of thinking “Oh god this is due tomorrow and I haven’t even started”. Saying you work well under pressure and procrastinating because of it is just not worth the bad grade, unsatisfactory effort, or migraine that comes from working five minutes before something is due. If that isn’t enough to get your creative juices flowing think in threatening hypotheticals. Ask yourself questions like, “what happens if I don’t turn this in?”, “what will my mom think if she sees this Z in the gradebook?”, and “will my teacher write a recommendation letter if I don’t even do her homework?”. Maybe with this you’ll scare yourself into achieving your goals.
Do Things That Make You Happy
After all of this remember that everything you’re doing in one way or another will bring you happiness, and if you find something isn't, eliminate it. Don’t say that homework doesn’t make you happy so you won’t do it. Sure maybe right now it doesn’t, but in the future when you get into your dream college or get the job you’ve been thinking about forever you’ll realize the things you did were worth your time.
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