Balancing work and rest in high school

Pre-College Issues High School Life
1

Hi all,

I feel like this post could help a lot of students out there. In my first year of high school, I burned out a lot and stressed out to the point where I had somewhat of an anxiety disorder. I stressed out because I was balancing my rigorous schoolwork (all honors; 4.6 GPA), writing on the school newspaper, creative writing (submitting to publications, etc.), and art. I felt like I was always working. I rarely gave myself a break and if I did, I’d feel guilty.

I genuinely really really love all of the things I’m doing, but for some reason I’m easily overwhelmed. My parents don’t put any pressure on me. They’re the most supportive parents one could have: it’s just me putting pressure on myself because I keep comparing myself to other kids out there which led to a really toxic lifestyle. I began planning materialistically for the future obsessively (listing out competitions for me to enter, summer camps, etc.). Life wasn’t really enjoyable anymore.

I’m much better now because I’ve given myself time to think about everything, but I have five general questions:

  1. what’s the best way to balance work and rest in high school?
  2. what were your high school schedules like?
  3. how do you change this “workaholic” mindset?
  4. how long did homework take and how do you minimize the number of hours spent studying (like how do you finish homework and understanding everything so you don’t have to spend that much time studying?)
  5. how do you concentrate fully at a task but not burn out?

Thanks you guys! Sorry for so many questions! Hope this discussion can help someone out there :slight_smile:

1 Like
2

BUMP

3

I would highly recommend the book by Cal Newport: “How To Become a Straight-A Student:
The Unconventional Strategies Real College Students Use to Score High While Studying Less”
It will help you with time management and how to be more efficient.
I think it would be useful for HS students too.

1 Like
4

Wow this is late but I wanted to answer anyways :slight_smile:

  1. Embrace the culture of working efficiently and going to sleep at a somewhat civilized hour (this took an embarrassingly long time to beat into my head). It’s not quite as cool sounding as the dude who pulled two all-nighters at the end of the semester to try and grab A’s on midterms (yes this actually happened at my school, don’t do this) but it works.

  2. Took pretty much the hardest courseload out of anyone in my class. Lots of short term stress, but in hindsight I don’t regret it

  3. I’m actually quite lazy by conventional standards, but I’m pretty good at prioritizing (dropped an AP class to grind for an academic olympiad junior year. Ended up doing well enough to grab awards that got me into some nice engineering schools yay). Being a workaholic isn’t necessarily a bad thing as long as you’re doing things you enjoy. In my case, I noped right out of AP Government after the first two weeks to spend more time studying science. My HYPSM-obsessed friends didn’t really understand why I was throwing my chances at T20s away but my gut feeling was that it was the smarter thing to do, which as of now holds true.

  4. HW typically took around 3-4 hours (my school leans toward grade deflation) but studying generally took a bit longer than that. To be honest, putting in good honest work really isn’t avoidable and optimizing your time won’t replace the necessity of studying.

  5. Try sticking to tasks you enjoy doing. I would say that I really loved 99% of the stuff I did in high school (except Model UN, which I thankfully had the sense to drop after sophomore year), and it’s a lot easier to stay on track doing things you enjoy doing!