As a student who is involved on campus, I can tell you that having a work-life balance with school involvement is impossible. As a young adult how do you prioritize your mental, physical and social health? How do you have a social life while staying on top of your assignments? The answer is in the question itself, prioritization.
Illinois Wesleyan preaches to students about the importance of being involved in everything you can. They encourage you to participate in at least three different things, an extracurricular like a sport, Greek Life and some sort of academic extracurricular.
You need to set your priorities for what is best for you and what is most important in your schedule. Most, if not all of us, are at Illinois Wesleyan on some sort of academic scholarship, so school should be a top priority.
Your personal wellbeing also needs to be prioritized in order for you to be able to perform well in class. Personal life should come before school. The difficulty with that is defining social and mental wellbeing. Putting a social event above your homework is obviously frowned upon, but at the same time everyone needs some sort of release after a stressful week.
As college students we are expected to try and do everything which can become exhausting and overwhelming. Spending your time out of class wisely is incredibly important. It is very easy to spend a free two hours studying and grabbing a snack, but it is also very easy to spend that time sleeping or watching a show you are binging with your friends. You have to pick and choose what is appropriate for what day. That doesn’t always mean having every hour of every day scheduled, but that does mean being mindful of free time.
Do a self check as you are reading this right now. After you are done reading this and probably check your phone for what new notifications you have, ask yourself what you really need to get done today.
Do you need to take a self care night and rest? Do you need to have a serious conversation with a friend that you have been avoiding? Do you have a huge amount of homework that you are procrastinating by reading this article instead? Do you need to have a meeting with your professor before you start studying for finals and realize that you have no idea what you are doing? Do you even know what you have to do? If not, that’s okay.
Maybe a good first step is to manage the notifications on your phone, turning off Instagram and TikTok notifications and managing your email so that all those stores that you only have shopped at once no longer message you.
Try setting up your email so that you have out of office hours on the weekends so you can have some personal time. With all of these suggestions you need to think about what is best for you. Most of us are here for school. The school work needs to get done so don’t ignore it, but don’t make it your only priority.