As many other students can agree, the school year has snowballed from bad to worse in terms of stress and school work. Whether the cause is due to adjusting back to in-person classes or it’s just the regular amount of course work. We are incredibly stressed out. We have exams, essays, labs, study groups, projects, etc. We are stressed out, we are tired. And of course, I myself have projects and essays that take a bunch of time and energy.
That being said, I say I don’t have a bunch of time, but love to spend time doing something else. As someone else said, human’s have the desire to be busy and to have tasks. Being a human, I have this need to being doing something important and a task that needs to be completed quickly. And obviously, as a student, it is a requirement to be busy, that is the reason I am here. But when I have moments when I should be doing work, I’m doing everything else.
During one of our classes in the past week, in a passing question, we were asked about down time, and how we should manage time to decompress, and relax. I thought about this a lot. The short answer: I don’t, I have horrible time management. But as I thought about the question more, I feel like I personally have a skewed sense of the line of procrastination and decompress/break time. This is something I need to sort out myself, I’m sure that other people have this sorted out.
Whenever I sit down to work on a project, I have everything I need laid out in-front of me. I have time, I have materials, I have energy. But from result of having other work, being tired or stress, I would like to have time between projects to relax. I find the breaks I take between projects are so long, so long to the point where I push too close to the due date of an assignment. When I’m taking that time to take a break between projects, I feel immense amount of shame, self-hatred, and disappointment in me not doing my work. When this wave of feelings come by I have a panic or all those feelings, and then it dissipates as I try to go back to the decompressing activity that I’m doing.
It’s just a frustration that I have as a student and an individual. Having so many projects to do that I get stressed out. This is also where I have a problem with procrastination. I have assignments to do, I wait until the last minute to do a problem, because I want to do things that are fun and relax me. This makes me wonder if I’m actually taking time to decompress or to just goof around and waste time because I don’t want to work. And I guess it’s technically both at some points? But I know there are moments where I can’t control that I got whisked away by something. I guess mentally, I want to be so far removed from stress, that I can’t think about it until I have those sharp moments of stress and panic.
What ever I’m actually doing. I hope I can figure out this problem of mine soon. I have two more semesters, and I would have to have anymore pangs of stress.
Unruly Bodies 
I completly relate to this! I feel like now you cant even truly relax because your always thinking of what you have to do and how your not completing those things by relaxing. It also sucks yet is comforting to see that everyone is kind of going through a slump. Especially since we are so isolated, I feel like a lot of the times when I’m losing the motivation for stuff, I automatically doubt myself and think about how other people are completing these things just fine. Remember to take time for yourself. I also have found when your sitting, unable to focus/complete something, just give yourself 5 minutes at that time to do nothing. Instead of taking 5 minutes stressing about how you have to do something, you might as well take it to clear your head and relax yourself. But thank for your honesty, its really comforting to know that other people are feeling this way too.
I understand and relate to your feelings quite a bit. When it comes to completing tasks and keeping busy, I am able to do everything else but what is important to do in that moment. Be it due to the fear of having to sit down and focus enough to understand the assignments I am given, or believing everything else but the work is far more interesting therefore should be given my full attention, it has become unbearably hard to be responsible with my time. The cause can come in many forms: school burnout, mental illness, and everything in between, getting what I need to get done has become increasingly impossible over the years and something I am working on to overcome. Thankfully, due to some individuals in my life and the mindset of wanting to improve myself, there have been ways I can overcome the procrastination issues and persevere to success. Things such as making myself a schedule, my friends motivating me to do my work, and just believing that I can accomplish what I set my mind to, methods such as these push me to attain the tasks and goals I set for myself. Hopefully, you too are able to grasp a way in which to persevere over difficulty; it is hard, but success can be obtained.
My blog post was also on the stress of school feeling heavier than ever, and I think a lot of people are feeling similar to you as we reach the end of the semester. Feeling anxious about an assignment so I procrastinate to avoid said assignment, which makes me more anxious because I know I need to do it, so I procrastinate even more, resulting in me stressing out doing the assignment the night it’s due is a terrible cycle I always find myself falling into, so you are not alone in feeling like you can never truly decompress. As students, I think we’ve been trained to see max productivity as the goal, and so when we’re not being productive, we feel shame, like you mentioned. Honestly, the only thing getting me through this last stretch is the thought of winter break, but I hope until then you take small opportunities to do things for yourself.
As a fellow procrastinator, I felt this post heavy. I’ve always procrastinated on any work, just for me to scramble to get things done before the deadline, and I would excuse myself by saying “I work best under pressure.” I can’t count how many times I procrastinated an assignment for days, just to finish after like 5/6 hours (It sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, not terrible). One of the best pieces of advice I was given for procrastination is to set days where you goof off and days you get to decompress, that way you don’t have to feel guilty about not working. I do hope you are able to find out what works best for you 😀
You’re not lazy, you’re exhausted.
In one class, we discussed going back to the basics when you’re feeling burnout. Simply remembering to eat, sleep, and drink seems so minuscule, but can do a lot. You don’t need to fill up a giant to do list, focus on the basics and remember you don’t have to put 100% effort into every single thing you do. 90% is still enough for an A.
Perhaps the problem isn’t us not doing enough, but the environment that has been cultivated to promote busy culture.