It is that time of year. Exams are upon you, final reports/presentations are due, and you find yourself lost in end of semester overwhelm. There are some things you can do to mitigate this pressure. Learn how to remove speculation and increase your self-accountability.
Many engineering students live with anxiety, tension and stress overwhelm. I addressed a similar topic in Post #09, offering suggestions to help with chronic worry. Here, I define stress and offer tips to help you understand one of the ways to manage it.
I know you want to experience the joys and offerings of the college life. But, hear me out, you cannot do it all (see Post #9). You are given a set amount of time to allocate. Part of your challenge is to prioritize most important tasks to least important. If you are trying to do too much, please read this post to help yourself hit the reset button.
Some students genuinely like to pursue as many activities and social events as possible. They believe that choosing something means missing out on something else. Other students find their calendars overbooked without intentionally doing so. It does not matter your reason why; pushing yourself beyond reasonable limits will eventually lead to burnout and/or overwhelm. What’s reasonable to you is not reasonable to the next person. Everybody’s burnout/overwhelm symptoms may look different. You must decide how much you can handle while caring for your health and vitality.
Are you mostly enjoying your journey? Given all the positives and negatives, are you mostly satisfied with recent choices you have made? Do you look forward to the future? Have you found a balance between school, sleep, fun time and down time? If you can’t answer yes to all these questions, find the answer to, “why not and what can I control here?”
It may be easy to get caught up in distractions as they are plentiful around campus. I’d like to offer a few question for you to seriously consider. Given all your activities, tasks and obligations, which ones will propel and nourish your future? Which ones are counter-productive to your future? I suggest you consider how your actions fall into these categories. Write or type the answers out and have a look as if you’re zooming out on your life. Are you trying to do too much?
Discipline and motivation is necessary to constrain down. If you zoomed out on your life and decided it’s time to slow down, try shortening activities or eliminating unnecessary actions. This will look different for everybody. Some will have to reduce time spent on their committees, organizations or volunteer work. Others may have to constrain their social media, their jobs or their TV time. So, how does a person constrain activities away? You ask yourself how necessary, how vital these tasks & activities are to your health, your future and your life balance.
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It seems like your semester has only begun – so why do you feel so overwhelmed already? Between classes, activities, social time and sleeping time, your schedule has somehow become overloaded. Read this post along with Post #9 to help yourself get a grip. You are not the only one who suffers from early semester overwhelm.
Post #9 Engineering Students Who WorryYour college career at this point in life involves meticulously taking gradual and deliberate steps that will lead you toward your degree. And I emphasize meticulous, gradual and deliberate because I know how the idea of graduation can seem so far away. I do understand that you may feel overwhelmed and even guilty if you so much as take a small mental break from your work. Worried engineering students can change a few habits to get some needed relief, read on!