The start of the winter semester always feels like a good time to refresh your standard routrines and discover new habits that make your life a little bit easier. However, finding out what to do to make your school life more manageable is not always as easy as you may think. I spent my winter break working on myself to refresh my body and mind for the new semester. After some thinking, I found a few ways to make my life less stressful.
- Space classes out more.
This one is something you can do based off of your first semester to make the the second semester flow smoothly. I tried to make my class days as short t as I could by spreading out my classes. Last semester, I found that with multiple classes a day with only an hour or two between them, as well as days when I was in school from 10:25a.m. to 9:50p.m. my social battery drained quickly. I also discovered I was getting burnt out faster, and I had little to no motivation to be in classes. This semester, I have one to two classes a day, with longer gaps between so I can either come home or relax on campus if I decide to stay, and I’m hoping this will help to avoid becoming burnt out too quickly.
- Bringing things to help with my anxiety (without being ashamed of it)
As someone with anxiety, I am a very fidgety person. I like to always be moving, shaking, or playing with something to help calm my brain and focus better. If I have classes that last almost 3 hours, involving just sitting and listening to a professor lecture, I usually leave early (which isn’t a great option) or play with something that annoys the people sitting near me. Every time I brought a stress ball or something to play with to school, I felt embarrassed that I needed something like that to calm me down physically and help me focus mentally. My main goal this semester is to not feel ashamed for doing things to help my academic performance.
- Preemptively hitting deadlines
As an anxious person , sometimes just knowing there’s a deadline in the next week or month can cause a lot of stress, especially during the build-up to midterms. To help with this panic and keep myself on track, I told myself I’m going to try to hit all my deadlines at least a week early. If I follow this rule, I’ll have time to still do any other things for my other classes on time without feeling stressed and like I don’t have any time.
Hopefully, these 3 things help me manage my time and anxiety better in school, and I hope I manage to keep up with them as well as add new goals when I need them. I hope that anyone reading this who has the same struggles also tries to better themselves this semester. The more you learn what your body needs, the better you will function when you fix it.