College: It's All About Balance

By Samantha Weller on May 2, 2016

Life is all about balance, and so is college. Oftentimes, college students feel certain, and many, points of their school years are overwhelming — overwhelming, without knowing how to handle the immense load of responsibilities.

We’re in the process of having to train for the real world, with our younger selves still wanting to get the last of being a teenager and have crazy fun adventures we can’t as easily have in the real world. Being at the toughest parts of our lives by far, our lives can certainly feel mind-boggling, but we need to remind ourselves that we still haven’t gotten into the real world yet, and that’s where the real challenge commences.

However, college can be our unintended practice for this crucial part of living a happy life.

theodysseyonline.com

We shouldn’t have to choose between getting more sleep, and having less free time and study time; or getting less sleep, and having more fun and focus towards class. While it may seem like that’s normal in college, it definitely is not, and should never be the case for anyone who strives to find success, in and out of college. In life, we have to make sacrifices, but we shouldn’t be constantly giving things up as if it’s a daily routine — we deserve more balanced lives.

But to truly obtain that, we have to look at our lives with intent to improve and recognize flaws in our routines. Rather than choosing what assets we want to prioritize the most, we can instead evaluate how to balance everything efficiently, and not have to sacrifice as much. It is possible to maintain a more regular sleep schedule, a sufficient study time, and a reasonable social life, believe it or not.

However, this involves learning to discipline the short time we have. But before doing this, here’s the most important thing to consider: if we can’t balance everything out and have to constantly lose sleep or miss parts of our lives in order to get passing grades, in a part of life that isn’t anywhere near as challenging as the real world, we need to consider making some drastic alterations in our lives.

We all have to face situations where we have to maintain an insurmountable amount of things all at once, some at opposite ends of a spectrum as if we’re being tugged on by both in a tug of war over life. When we have these times of extreme workloads, it makes other, seemingly challenging, times seem a lot more manageable.

While thinking into the depths of managing things we have to adapt to the notion of quantity over quality. The fun parts of life that include our friends and free time all change when we don’t have as much time to do them, and make more out of when we can do them.

via insighteducation.co

It was during one of my busiest semesters that I was beginning to write articles and occasionally doing work study. At first, I constantly worried that I wouldn’t be able to free myself from the workload, or barely would be able to. I had to push myself more than ever to figure out how I could handle it all. I soon discovered how to use not only my free time better, but the time I set aside to work turned into a much less distraction-filled and efficient time.

I learned to do homework and completely avoid my phone for hours on end, and find the best times to study and go out. I quickly realized when I was staying up late doing nothing, because I was tired. I realized when I could not work efficiently and needed to go to bed, instead of mindlessly being distracted on the computer from not being able to focus or being too fatigued, and I got a sense of my maximum potential to finish tasks in smaller fragments of time.

Sometimes our perception of too much work isn’t anything compared to much harder situations. One of my professors was able to get a PhD, while maintaining a family — and he still had free time. He said this in response to students complaining about missing a “hard” assignment. A similar scenario happened in a class where the class had to give group members times they were free to work on a project outside of class. Few people cooperated, and everyone ‘apparently’ did not have any free time, or so they thought. My professor reminded us that if he works as a teacher while he has a family with two children, one of which is on a sports team, and the other with learning disabilities, and still have loads of free time to himself, we can certainly have free time. I don’t know if it made everyone realize, but it certainly made me realize that we don’t even know much worse work.

I hear about other professors I have had, and how our workload now is easy compared to the long hours they have to had to partake in obtaining higher degrees. This should never make us feel as though we are not hardworking now or aren’t doing much compared to what others are doing; but, it should make us realize that there’s always other levels of intensity with responsibilities, and some of the most complicated ones still have those doing them, finding free time.

If we put our mind to it, most of us can do a lot more than we’re doing right now. Besides, we have to eventually if we want to make it in the real world. We can’t avoid tackling more work than we’re used to, because we never know what will come along in life. But, whatever circumstances do come along, we want to be as prepared for it as we can.

As college students, we are usually at a point where we have worked more than we ever have. Most of us have in our heads that we have everything figured out, even though we aren’t getting enough sleep or find ourselves occasionally rushing on homework last minute. However,  we don’t know reality and when times can become more busy than imaginable. It isn’t about the workload; it’s how we organize ourselves that can make work seem lighter with good organization and strategies. It’s mentality we have towards ourselves — we have to have a certain level of confidence that we can not only do it, but do it much better than we imagine.

We shouldn’t just be doing the work, we should be constantly pushing ourselves in the process.

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