With the gloomy skies and constant rain, it can become hard to stay focused and on your purpose. As a third-year student myself, I’ve realized that my year always starts strong. In September, I seem to be on top of anything and everything and it feels like I’m superhuman, achieving a million things at once; then all of a sudden, its a new semester.

I have a plethora of work I need to catch up on and my extracurriculars have went from hiking and boxing, to Netflix and KFC. The unhealthy habits affect your mental and physical health, and the good thought patterns you possessed when you were ready to attack the year in September, seem like distant memories of a person that was far too optimistic for your current taste. Cynicism starts to take over and everything is looked at with a negative Lense instead of a positive one. It’s far easier to deal with the consequences of your failures when you’ve been expecting the worst, but it also puts you in a position to not try your best to begin with. The most important things you need to realize about this phenomenon, is that…

1. Everyone experiences it

2. It’s not your fault

3. You need to be prepared to minimize this from happening as much as possible. The phenomenon I am talking about is burnout. 

Our over-exposure to social media makes us think that we should be goliaths of productivity and be able to achieve more than what is actually humanely possible without it impacting our mental and physical health negatively. Just because you have 16 hours a day when you are awake, doesn’t mean you should be spending every one of those hours doing something that is taxing on your mind or body. You need to dedicate parts of your day to keeping your mind centered and catering to the needs of your body.

Create key tenets for yourself that you perform daily or weekly, to ensure you are not over-exerting yourself. If you find you are skipping meals, use the weekend to meal-prep for the week (The same weekend might be what you use to crash if you’ve been burnt out or tired from not eating properly during the week). It’s about balance, don’t let the pendulum swing too hard either way.

If you relax too much, it turns into complacency, but if you work too much, your body’s going to force itself to relax, and this time you will pay back the time you stole from it with interest. Things that I do to try and keep the balance are playing a sport weekly, keeping track of my deadlines and organizing my time accordingly, and talking to people who I think offer wisdom on a weekly basis (my sister and parents).