Every college student could use a little reassurance during finals week. Break is so close we can taste it, and yet we have to force a semester’s worth of material into our exhausted brains and take a bunch of tests that have a huge impact on our grades and future lives. Naturally, mental breakdowns abound during finals. So here are a few things to keep in mind during the week of hell we call finals week, and hopefully curb those breakdowns and help you relax a little!
1. You are worth so much more than your grades say. You are a person who has a unique way of seeing the world, you bring your own light to the life you live, and your grades do not define you. You will still be you if you fail these exams, and you will still have worth as a wonderful human being who brings so much beauty into this world by being who you are.
2. No matter what grades you get, there will still be people who love you. Often, during finals week, we go down the slippery slope of failure, kind of like “If I fail this test, I’m going to hate myself and drop out and my family will disown me and I’ll have no friends and life will be a black dismal hole of nothing worth living for.” That is not true. That is the farthest from true you can get. You will still be loved, you will still be worthy of having a wonderful life, and you will still be an important, beloved part of the Auburn family.
3. It is never a crime to indulge. Many of us put so much weight on studying during finals week that we forget to take care of ourselves. Cook yourself a nice meal. Take a 30 minute break to talk to your roommate about something other than how stressed you are. Take a hot bath with lots of smell-good soap. Take some time to be you, and not the you strung out on 7 cups of Caribou coffee and more stress than you’ve ever felt in your life. It is going to be okay in the long run if you take a few minutes for yourself.
4. Your mental health is more important than these grades will ever be. This has helped me out so much over my time in college. If you find yourself hyperventilating over a semester’s worth of chemistry notes, or you need to take a little time to recover from the trauma of realizing you remember nothing about Horace’s Ars Poetica, get up and take a breather. It is more important to take care of yourself than to force yourself to push through a major breakdown and halfway learn some of the material. Trust me, do yourself a favor, drink some hot chocolate, watch one episode on Netflix, and come back to studying. You’ll thank yourself for it, and your brain will too. Mental pain is just as important to fix as physical pain, and just like you can’t run a marathon on a broken leg, you can’t learn a whole semester of material on a brain that is hurting.
5. You are smarter than you think. Through a lot of time spent tutoring and helping other people with studies in my life, I have learned that when people are studying, they often think of themselves as stupid and unable to learn the material, while in reality, they know so much already. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Study as much as you can handle, and trust yourself to do well. You’re going to do worse if you stress out about the exams rather than just saying “I studied my hardest, and I will do my best on this test because I am a smart and capable human being.” You are smarter than you think.
Have any feel-good finals advice? Let us know in the comments.