“I only got like three hours of sleep last night.”
“Yeah, I completely forgot to eat lunch today.”
We’ve all heard these phrases or ones just like them. It has become a regular point of conversation among college students amidst stress and chaos. When did these conversations begin to have an underlying sense of competition? When was the first time we told others how many credit hours we were taking and hoped they would give some extreme reaction? And what reaction were we looking for? Care? Jealousy?
I fall into this trap most days of the week. It’s easy when you are surrounded by it. It feels easier to crack a joke about how you haven’t slept than to deal with the actual repercussions of our exhaustion. But there are so many issues with this mentality and the conversations surrounding it.
This is deeply rooted in an ideal of work being prioritized above wellbeing. Nowhere can this be found more than on college campuses and in corporate employment. Work-life balance is something that people constantly commit to improving yet somehow never do. Because even at an institutional level, to keep up, it feels as if we have to sacrifice aspects of our physical and mental health. This is so deeply ingrained in us that often no one recognizes how problematic it is.
Equally as problematic are the conversations we have about the sacrifices we are making for the sake of our work. Telling our friends that we forgot to eat should not be funny or cute; it should be concerning. Yet we don’t bat an eye at it. This claim is especially problematic for the triggering effect it can have on people who have had a disordered relationship with food. It is a small comment, but it can have real negative effects on people that we might not be able to see.
All of these comments create this expectation to live up to. It is unfair and unhealthy. Not everyone needs to take eighteen credit hours to be viewed as a good student. If a person has to sacrifice food and sleep, maybe they shouldn’t be taking that many hours in the first place.
For the most part, students will be more engaged and successful if they limit their commitment to what they can handle. If we prioritize the quality of work over the quantity of our work, I believe two things will happen. Students will comprehend more content and even improve their scores. They will also be healthier and happier human beings.
I’m not ignorant enough to believe that everyone can take twelve hours and graduate on track. College students are busy. The workload is challenging and time-consuming. But by reorganizing priorities, even with a lot of commitments, there should still be sufficient time to eat lunch and sleep for more than four hours a night.
Working toward this involves setting aside the competition and expectation of running ourselves too thin. We have to allow ourselves to treat our wellbeing with the same urgency as our workload. It may involve saying no to certain things even though you don’t want to. But nothing should outweigh the importance of our health.
Even if you don’t take care of yourself, we need to stop the conversations encouraging this kind of behavior. Naturally there is a difference between expressing a genuine struggle of exhaustion and business. There are ways to have those conversations, but they shouldn’t be offhanded humorous comments that brush off the real issue.
So, let’s find other points of discussion to focus on instead of how we run ourselves into the ground. Likewise, when hearing these comments, take a breath, and let go of the urge to live up to this expectation. If we do, I imagine we’ll be much more well-rested, and our conversations will even get much more interesting.
