Finals are upon us, which means we’re all in for a week of all-nighters, poor food choices and constant stress. Take a step back and look at the hilarity that is finals week on a college campus: students running around in pajamas, papers hanging out of their heavy backpacks, not bothering to shower but finding time to sleep in corners of the library. It’s a complete free-for-all.
As the end of the semester creeps closer, students are expected to feel stressed. Even though I’ve had busy weeks with multiple exams and papers due throughout the semester, I still feel obligated to be stressed for finals week. Everyone else is doing it, and I find it fun to play along: “I’m not gonna sleep for the next 72 hours!!!” The fact of the matter is that each of us has more than enough time to do everything we need to prepare for finals week. If you sit down for six hours to write a paper and spend three of those hours browsing Facebook, Instagramming your coffee cup with your study space in the background and tweeting about the kid who’s watching anime in the Pods, then maybe you will end up needing to stay up into the wee hours of the morning to complete your assignments. But if you sit down and focus for a bit, you’ll get your work down bit by bit and you won’t have to stress about it.
Stress is immensely detrimental to your health and doesn’t help you in any way. All stress is imaginary within your mind — you’re psyching yourself out, and that makes you less productive. This is a vicious cycle: “I don’t want to start my work because it’s stressful, but now I’m stressed because I don’t have enough time to do my work.” We psych ourselves out by being intimidated by the idea of finals week — it sounds daunting. There are so many stress-relief events and advertisements around campus that I feel like I should feel stressed so that I can de-stress. Already, I’ve heard several times that finals week is “why I look like shit today.” I’m writing to tell you that you don’t need to look like shit and get three hours of sleep in a five-day period. You have to write that paper anyway, so work ‘til you start to lose focus, take lots of healthy study breaks and get some sleep! You’ll perform much better on your finals if you’re in a good state of mind and well rested.
– Rebeccca Schoenberg is a senior double majoring in psychology and philosophy