It’s midterm season! Now as this busy and stressful time approaches, as a college student there are multiple things that factor into stress. Some of these things include external pressure from family to do well, monetary pressures with scholarships, and just worldly pressures with things like impostor syndrome when looking at grades. The biggest thing to remember is that at the end of the day the grades that you receive are just letters or numbers in the grand scheme of things. And while midterms are an integral part of college, they should not be the end-all-be-all. College should be about making friends and putting yourself first, and while midterms can cause a lot of stress in our lives as college students it’s important to put our mental health and ourselves first.
One of the many things that can help is making sure that you take the breaks that your body and mind need. If you do not fuel your physical and mental well-being, then you cannot be fully prepared for the midterms that you take. Take some time to get outside, go for a walk, or go to the gym. We could all benefit from physical exercise, and it is a way for us to get our minds off stressful things in our lives. One way to help mental well-being is to take a break and do something else such as a coloring book or watching your favorite show on Netflix or hanging out with your friends on or off-campus so that your mind can take a break from the things that you might be stressing over. Socializing with friends is an amazing way to take your mind off the stress of midterms and just take a break or have some fun.
Find things that bring you joy in life, that help you take your mind off the bad things going on in your life. One thing that I always find myself doing is reframing my thoughts in a more positive light so that I can look at midterms as a way to improve my grades. This helps me figure out what I don’t know so that I can find a way to find help with what I don’t know and do better at the end of the semester. The more I do that, the more that I realize that these grades do not necessarily define me, instead they give me a way to improve while still focusing on the little things in life.
In the end, know that as college students we should be doing something that we love and that tests should not dictate our worth.
We are worth more than our grades in college, and we have personality traits that help us expand on what we love. Take some time to think about what you love, and why you are in college. We should be finding something that makes us happy and be doing it because we love to do it, not because we have pressure from outside sources.