Getting sick sucks. Getting sick in college sucks even more. It’s so easy to find yourself ill while at school because of the nonstop lifestyle that we are expected to live. We wake up, go to class, go to the library to do homework, go to club meetings, go to the library to study, and go to bed, all while trying to find time to eat, sleep, and (sometimes) work out. Then, comes the weekend where we get up, do work, and go out until the early hours of the morning, and do it all again the next day.
While all of this seems fine and normal at the beginning, it can really start to catch up to you. I recently experienced this when I woke up one Friday morning feeling like a personification of death. It felt like a combination of the worst cold, worst migraine, and worst hangover in the world. Life as a college student had finally taken its toll on my body.
All week, I had been staying up late studying for my exams, and working tirelessly during the day to perfect the papers that I had due at the end of the week. When I wasn’t doing that I was going to club meetings, dance rehearsals, and attempting to find time to socialize. In the moment, this all seemed fine. Sure, I was tired, but coffee was able to fix that. I used caffeine to help me through the week, even though my body was telling me to rest.
The night that put me over the edge was the evening before my Psychology 171 exam. This was my first exam in college, and it wasn’t going to be an easy one either. My study guide was 22 pages long, and I insisted on memorizing every single term, theory, and famous psychological study that could possibly show up on the test. I spent my entire day leading up to the exam in the library studying, and then came back to my dorm room and crammed until 1:30 in the morning.
The day of the exam, I woke up early and started studying even more, continuing up until 30 minutes before the test. Afterwards, I just wanted to crash, but because it was now Thursday, aka the start of the college weekend, I felt obliged to be social and hang out with friends. While I didn’t go “out” so to speak, I wasn’t in bed until 1 a.m.
Finally, my body told me that it was done. I woke up feeling like crap. My head hurt, I felt super congested, and I was fluctuating between being absolutely freezing and feeling as if my dorm room was a sauna.
Sometimes it is hard to remember that we aren’t super heroes that can go nonstop without ever taking a moment to breathe. I am the biggest example of this, because I never want to slow down. I want to get as much as I can out of my college experience, so I forget that I need to take care of myself in order to do that.
Overworking is a real and serious problem that occurs on college campuses across the country, and sometimes it takes getting sick for us to remind ourselves how important it is to just rest. Not being able to pull yourself out of bed and needing someone to make you ramen (shoutout to the best roomie ever) is a horrible feeling. Knowing that you did it to yourself is even worse. Missing that club meeting isn’t the end of the world, and staying in and missing one frat party isn’t going to kill you. Working yourself so hard that you get sick, though, just might. Well, not really. But you get the point.