The early bird gets the worm—it’s a catchy phrase you’ve heard since before you can remember. Your mom recited it to you when you were a seven-year-old who didn’t want to get up for school, and it rings in your head now as you’re a tired college student listening to your annoying alarm before hitting snooze.
But what if this expression is actually wrong?
The underlying problem with this phrase is that its wisdom stems solely from the bird’s perspective. It doesn’t consider other perspectives—such as the worm’s.
Now, if you look at the same familiar phrase but from the opposite perspective—The early worm gets eaten by the bird—it seems to advise the complete opposite sentiment, urging you to sleep in and relax.
So what makes us humans the birds instead of the worms? What if we are the worms after all?
Society has developed into a dangerously fast-paced highway of tasks and work. Ever since elementary school, it has been constantly drilled in our brains that we must wake up early for school and then do homework after school to succeed. Why has it been deemed bad or lazy to take a break from this never-ending stream of labor when perhaps humans just aren’t cut out for such a busy life?
The increasing rates of burnout, anxiety and depression in human society suggest that human nature isn’t meant to handle the early bird lifestyle. Data from the Healthy Minds Network shows there has been a 50 percent increase in the number of students who qualify for at least one mental health issue since 2013. I can’t help but feel that this overachiever mentality that we are taught to adopt has something to do with it.
In no way am I urging you to give up on your studies and indefinitely drown in laziness. Instead, listen to your body. When you feel burnt out and in need of rest, don’t push that desire down, even if it seems necessary at the moment. Instead, view your mental health with the same importance as your physical health. Just like how you go to the gym to exercise your body, take time to exercise your brain. Take mental health days, watch your favorite TV show, call a friend and take breaks from studying—do whatever you need to do to ease stress.
With finals coming up in one nerve-racking month, the message of this article may seem sabotaging. But in truth, making an effort to prioritize your mental health—even when it may seem counterintuitive—will help your academics thrive even more. There are numerous reasons for this, such as the fact that high levels of anxiety interfere with working memory, causing you to forget information that you have studied. If you take the time to mend this anxiety, both your mood and test scores will improve.
So, the early bird may get the worm, but the worm that presses snooze lives to see another day.
