The Student’s Gamble: Good Mental Health… Or Good Grades?
Esther Seo | B.A. in Psychology from Yale University
Prioritization is described as putting something ahead of or above another.
It’s hard to digest the prioritization of mental health over academics
Everyone’s made the trade before. Knock a few hours off your sleep to study just a bit more and feel a little bit more prepared for that exam tomorrow. No big deal. You can make up that sleep tomorrow, but you also know that pushing aside self-care for the sake of your academics won’t be a one-time thing.
The COVID pandemic has raised mental health awareness and with it, the importance of successful education. Oftentimes, we are encouraged to prioritize mental health over our education, especially because good mental health is a necessary foundation for peak academic achievement. But it’s stressful and even frustrating to think about our academics and mental health in that way.
Prioritization is described as putting something ahead of or above another. You consider your values and commitments to create a ranking of sorts and address them in that order. It’s easier said than done, though. Some students value both equally, and some value academics over mental health, but in general, it’s hard to digest the prioritization of mental health over academics. While we care about ourselves, our grades are also incredibly important. Mental health can be recovered, and we know all too well that one grade can deliver a fatal blow to our GPA. That’s unrecoverable. We need to keep in mind, however, that in the long run, constant de-prioritization of our mental health can damage our quality of life and makes for a hard road.
CREATING A GOOD FIT
Mental health and education don’t have to be mutually exclusive in your list of priorities. There are ways to exercise self-care as we study. There are the classic bits of advice: stop procrastinating, make a schedule, keep a to-do list, do things in chunks. It could be that you’re already discouraged from trying and failing to effectively use these strategies, but these solutions aren’t one-size fits all. Sometimes, you can’t bring yourself to do anything. You know you’ve got those deadlines creeping up, but you also feel like you can mooch off a little bit more, just until you feel motivated. Who knows, maybe that anxiety of a looming deadline might kick you into action!
Alternatively, instead of implementing these small steps into your studying habits, you can go big, too. For me, I chose not to do any work at all on a select weekday.
Weekends are natural buffers when school is in session. We tend to want to keep Saturdays and Sundays free from work, but that normally doesn’t go according to plan. We usually end up having to do some work during that time, whether that be a result of procrastination or to get a head start before the week brings deadlines and new assignments.
Waiting for that weekend can be hard. It’s an entire five days before freedom. In college, I made a buffer for myself in the middle of the week. I had Wednesday classes, though, so I worked to keep the last half of my day clear. As soon as my last class ended, I didn’t do work. I goofed off and did anything else, regardless of whether I had incoming deadlines. To keep up, I redistributed my workload around that free half-day. I kept my weekends flexible, and I looked forward to my self-care time on Wednesdays, too.
Taking a moment to understand what solutions work best for you is time well spent. If totally rigid schedules aren’t a good fit, try implementing partially or wholly flexible ones. You find it hard to schedule when to do work? Try scheduling specific times when not to do work. When you have something fun coming up, it might encourage you to put in more work to lessen that mental load before then, so you can fully enjoy yourself.
UNDERSTANDING YOURSELF
To come up with these tailored solutions, you need to understand your own boundaries first. Logically, you know that you don’t function properly when you’re tired. Realistically, you’re too anxious to get rest or take a break because you feel it’s unproductive. That feeling of unpreparedness and the fear of failure keeps you going without paying attention to your state of mind. So, when will you pause? When do you drop?
As a disclaimer, I’m not saying you should give up when you’re tired or when it’s hard. You must understand your personal boundaries when starting any task. At what point are you willing to lay down your pencil? And the hard, if not harder, next step is then to acknowledge it.
You know your head starts dipping and your vision starts blurring past 11? Go to bed and finish up in the morning. As groggy as you might be in the morning, it’s not helpful for you to trudge on through the night, either. Don’t listen to those who use all-nighters to flex how hard they’ve worked on something. The amount of effort you put in is not equivalent to the amount of time you spend on a task. Value quality over quantity!
If your logic of rejecting breaktime is because you want to do the most you can in the limited amount of time you have, then really go all the way. Don’t sacrifice a decent grade because you had no energy left to double-check your completed work. Submitting completed work is better than nothing, but if you’ve made all this effort so far, you might as well aim to make the most of it. Make time and space to do every step.
Recommendations of prioritizing mental health come from a good place, but oftentimes it does not encapsulate the diversity of our individual differences in deciding what and how to prioritize. Don’t be afraid to make things work for you.
Struggle doing this by yourself? Get others involved for better accountability. Support can come in all sizes and shapes. You can reach out to mentors, advisors, or communities for social, cultural, or even spiritual needs.
While it might seem counterproductive to reach out for such non-academic needs, you want people to celebrate with you when you do great and people to fall back on when you don’t do so well. Having a solid support system not only provides you with ample opportunity to ask for accountability buddies but also surrounds you with care. Knowing that someone will be looking out for you when you aren’t able to on your own relieves burdens of its own. While your academics are ultimately driven by your efforts alone, the upkeep of your motivations and resilience, key drivers of said efforts, becomes much easier when shared with others.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Esther Seo was born in Korea and has lived in NY, LA, and OK. She holds double BAs in psychology and history and an education studies certificate from Yale University. Her research interests center around human development, ranging from childhood to young adulthood, in relation to academic and behavioral outcomes. She currently works at Yale as a psychology postgraduate research associate and also spends her free time working with the Fair Opportunity Project to improve college accessibility. Outside of work, she loves to take care of her plants and watch movies.
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