You know when it’s Thanksgiving and you’ve just literally inhaled an overload of food, went back for seconds, and then forced yourself to enjoy a bigger-than-the-average-size bowl of dessert?
Think about it—you can’t possibly expect to consume anything else! You literally used the last bit of your effort, the last bit of your inner strength, to get all of that food into your system. Now that you hate and love yourself for enjoying this meal and gaining five pounds, you sit on the couch and plan to enjoy your food coma. For the rest of the day, all you want to do is relax and enjoy hours of doing nothing.
But then…this is where the plot thickens.
As you get in the most comfortable position and your mind begins to drift into delirium, your mom yells a little too loud from the kitchen for you to come help clean up and do the dishes.
You don’t want to do dishes! You don’t want to do anything! You just want to enjoy the amount of work your digestive system is putting in. I get it. Just say it: “I just want to do less!”
If the analogy itself is not screaming from the rooftop yet, senioritis is real!
Do not feel bad or beat yourself up over something that’s just as common, and sometimes inevitable, freshman fifteen.
You work hard for years and then you’re at the final stretch of your academic chapter, but then by the time you got there you realized that you gave college everything you had already. You may feel like you have nothing left to give or like you have a little push left, but not enough worth anything, so you push it aside. Listen. Speaking from personal experience, senioritis can get the best of you; it could bring you down academically. Moreover, it could bring you down physically. Some students’ case of senioritis is more severe than others, but there’s nothing a little dose of encouraging tips can’t fix!
Step 1: Re-Excite yourself about college
In life, you’re going to have one or more than a million times where you’ll wish you could go back in time and change a few things. Apply that truth to your senior year; get excited to dive into a new world all over again!
Step 2: Get a new look
Ever heard of the saying: “When you look good you feel good?” If you change your hair color, adapt some new style tastes, get a little more fit, you will feel better about yourself and that boost of confidence may be the key to getting you right back on track to want to give the final year a new and improved version of you!
Step 3: Compete with the “old you”
Let your senior year be the New Year’s resolution that you actually keep. Set a goal to do better academically than you’ve ever done in your previous years, and join some new organizations! Of course, you do not want to put more responsibilities on yourself that you can handle, but enjoy stepping out of your comfort zone even more and challenging yourself. That’s what life is all about right?
I could go on and on with more tips to cure your common case of senioritis but the truth is, if you actually have it bad, you don’t want to read that much. If you don’t retain anything else then at least remember this wonderful cliché: it is not how you start, but rather how you finish.