24 hours. 1,440 minutes. 86,400 seconds. And yet not enough time. Classes take up hours. Interactions and relationships take up minutes. And ever present thoughts focused on the next thing take up our remaining seconds. We never have enough time for a break. Or do we?
Recent studies have argued that the average female college student spends 8 to 10 hours on their phone everyday. That’s somewhere around 540 minutes and 32,400 seconds everyday. Why should we care? Some of what we use our phones for throughout the day is valuable and can even be deeply meaningful. Checking in with friends. Calling our now long-distance parents. But if we’re honest, a lot of what we use our phones for everyday are things we won’t remember or even care about hours later. And we spend more time on it than we realize most of the time.
Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t a guilt trip or persuasive essay on the detrimental consequences of screen time, but rather an emphasis on how much often unintentional time we waste throughout the day. We constantly feel like we are running out of time. But maybe we aren’t allocating our time in the right way.
Most of us set a mental checklist for the day. The classes we have to attend. The assignments we have to complete. The friends we have to make time for throughout the week. The classmates we have to leave a few minutes for and the familiar faces we stop to say hi to while we are en route. The minutes we have to set aside for eating meals and getting at least a few hours of sleep – fueling our innate human needs. But on top of that we are constantly propelled to keep up with the “pace of life”. Keeping up with posts on instagram. Snapping our friends back without letting too much time go by. Watching the most popular shows on netflix or memorizing popular sounds on tik tok. By the time we have figured out everything we need to check off for the day, we are already mentally exhausted and feel like we are running out of time.
But there really is time, even when it feels impossible we just have to prioritize it. The value of even just a few minutes of time to yourself or a mental break in a busy day can transform perspectives and elevate energy more than we might think. But it isn’t easy and it has to be intentional. That being said, here are a few reminders and a few reasons to take a break today.
- We can’t do it all: Some of us are constantly afraid of missing out, but the truth is in the environment and pace of college, there will always be something to miss out on.
- We need time to process: College is a unique scene in and of itself for many reasons. One of which being that we are constantly surrounded by other people. Whether it’s intentional or unintentional interaction we are constantly finding ourselves in communication with others in the dining hall, on a walk to class, in our halls or apartment complexes, in the library, in the line for coffee, at University events, in class, and everything in between. With that being said, we have to be intentional about the time we spend alone, not in the presence of others in order to process and regenerate as an individual.
- We need a balance: With the reality of relatively constant communication, we need time alone to simply know how to spend time alone. Within our culture and our impulse to post and share things while in the company of others, many of us have lost the ability to spend time alone, it can feel like a foreign concept but it is vital to understanding our needs apart from the needs of others.
Whether you are an introvert or an extrovert, it is important to know how to spend time alone so you can know when your body and your mind need a break. While it can feel scary at the end of the day to retreat and spend time with ourselves, all of the above reasons contribute to why it is important to not only our success but our well being.
So what would it look like to take 5 minutes? To take a break. Life is busy and sometimes it’s so busy we forget what it looks like to slow down and to pause. When it feels like there is no time we are easily overwhelmed with full schedules and tired eyes. When we take a few to pause, turn our phones off, take a few breaths, look around, and experience the little things we are able to step back and appreciate the bigger picture and find joy in an intentional balance.