Balancing Mental Health and Grades

ABBEY VANDERPOEL – Despite mental health becoming an increasingly prominent topic in our discourse about access to health services, there is still an existing stigma around it in the university community. Students are expected to be tired and stressed, and stress is equated to working hard. If you’re not stressed, you must not be working hard enough. The expectation is that students will exhaust themselves for the sake of grades and academia and those that do so will succeed in the field.

 This is a dangerous expectation not just for students, but also for the entire academic community. Chronic stress has been linked to a significant amount of health conditions like heart disease, obesity, diabetes, gastrointestinal problems, immune disorders, and accelerated aging and death. Why then do we not just tolerate these expectations, but encourage them?

The simple answer is grades. Most undergraduate programs and graduate programs do not consider students whose grades are below an arbitrary GPA guideline. High grades are essential for undergraduate students applying to graduate programs and those with aspirations to attend professional programs such as law school or medical school. 

Many students prioritize their  grades above all else, including their own physical and mental health. We are constantly making decisions about how to spend our limited time and energy. There are moments where we have to decide what is more important to us: taking care of ourselves or getting a higher grade. Making those decisions is difficult, but there are steps you can take to manage them and to make sure that you are not harming your mental health over grades. Systematic change starts with individuals. The best thing that students can do for themselves is learn how to manage stress and set boundaries within the university system that they are in. These are a few of the steps we as students can take to make sure that we are taking care of ourselves in the midst of a hectic semester. 

Make a schedule and set boundaries for yourself. If relaxing is hard for you and you constantly find yourself feeling guilty for taking a break to just watch TV or read a book, then schedule an hour of time off for yourself once a day. Blocking time off in your schedule that is just for you to purposely do nothing is important. Remember to also set the boundary of not letting yourself agree to do extra work during that time. That time is for you , and that time is important. 

Try to set up a schedule for yourself.  You don’t have to plan every minute of your day obviously, but sticking to the timeline that you commit yourself to will help build a routine. 

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was to make sure I make my time productive. If I have set aside two hours to work on an article, I need to make sure that I actually work on that article. I can’t let the project drag out by stopping to watch Netflix; I need to use those two hours to get my work done so that it does not cut into the time I have set aside for myself. This also makes the time I’ve set aside for myself much more enjoyable because I know that I have worked hard and been productive. 

Sometimes we also just have to make difficult decisions. There are only 24 hours in a day. Sometimes we have more work that needs to be done than we have time to do it in. When this happens, I have to remind myself of a couple of things. The first is that anything is better than a zero. I am a perfectionist. I hate turning in anything that is not perfect. I have had to learn that getting a fifty on something is so much better for my grade than taking a zero. The second thing is that taking lower grades on the smaller assignments will not kill me. I am actually likely to do better in the class if I focus my energy on the big assignments. Sometimes taking a lower grade on a small assignment so I can focus on a big assignment is more beneficial in the long run  

The final step to take when considering your work and mental health balance is that you are a person with full agency. You have the power to make decisions about what you want to do and what is important to you. Everyone has different priorities; yours are not going to be the same as your friends or the person next to you on the bus. When you set your priorities, remember that it is okay to have different ones than your friends. Take a step back and remind yourself that no one thing can define you. You are a person of value with free agency to change your life at any moment and you have the final say about what your priorities are.

Editor: Sania Qazi

Photography Source: Bianca Patel