Balancing School Life with Personal Life

As we are starting our Spring Semester or Winter Quarter right now. Many of us are probably trying to find a way to practice our balancing between school and personal life. I can tell you that it's something that I really want to do this semester. With six classes going on right now, it's really important that I take the opportunity to understand what it means when I say, I must allow myself to have some space to breathe a relax. Although gaining your education is a really important factor for yourself, it's also important to put your mental health/energy as priority as well. Many of us tend to cram so much of our schoolwork throughout the week that we don't seem to have any time to relax anymore. With some personal experience/additional gaining in trying to balance the two. Let's talk about ways we can help ourselves balance the two together.

1. Choosing a Day Off from School

As hard as it can be for some of us, it's important to give yourself a daybreak from school. By having a free from school day, you are able to refresh your mind and think about something different for now. If you have your mind focused on school for a very long span of time, it can be very exhausting for us and completely drain you out. The mentality and motivation to push forward will be completely gone. For me, I like to have my Sundays to myself. It's a reason why I call my Sundays a 'Self Care Sunday' for me. I want to make sure that day it sorts of like my 'staycation' for myself. By using my Sunday as my day away from school. I am able to self-reevaluate myself and refresh my mind to prepare for another week.

2. Having a Cut Off Between Sleep and Work

As impossible as it may sound for many of us, it's completely understandable why staying up late to finish an assignment or honestly just pulling an all nighter can happen more frequently as a college student. During my first two years as a college student, all nights were pretty frequent for me, especially during finals or midterm season. But during the end of my second year, entering my third year, I had a little epiphany about my mind in how pointless it is to stay up all night to study for something if 80% of the time when I go to class, most of the information that I studied for gets thrown out of my mind. Ever since then, I've set the cut off time from doing schoolwork to be at exactly 11:30 p.m. To allow my mind to rest for the whole night, it gives the opportunity for me to process the information of what I've learned, therefore it doesn't feel scrambled the next day.

3. Knowing the Limits with your Classes

Oh registration.... The most stressful part of them all. Now, I've made a few mistakes in the past when it came to registering for classes. One of them was taking Chemistry and Calculus I at the same time. Yup, biggest mistake I made, but you know what? I've learned from them. The real lesson of this is to know for sure how much classes can you handle. For the sake of yourself, please don't overwork yourself to the point your whole life is about classes. For me, the limit that I am able to take right now is six classes. I know, that may sound pretty crazy which is why I took 5 classes during the fall semester. Personally, I wanted to give myself a sneak peek of how it would feel like with 5 classes until taking 6 this semester. Once I saw the results of how I did last semester, I asked myself, 'Am I okay with adding one more to my schedule during the spring?' The truth is, with a better grade/gpa that I had during the previous semester, I gave myself the green light to do just that! The key is, dip your toes a little bit to see your limits before diving into a situation you know it's too late to get yourself out of.

Alright, those are my 3 key tips that I have on balancing school and personal life for now. With these three being written, it's also something that I personally want to take account to for myself as I tend to work and improve on over time. That being said my chimera fam....