“Taking breaks is okay and a part of the rat race to success.”

   As someone who has countless times sacrificed their mental health for school, I learned the best quote that helped me have a more efficient mindset and approach: “order breeds order and chaos breeds chaos.” Coach Cook told my entire class this and I could see the simple words astonish all my fellow over achievers. Was this true? Well, I have implemented this mentality and I’m walking proof.  

   Coach Cook emphasized that when all areas of your life (mental state, physical state, spiritual state, academic state, and social state) is in order, then you perform better. Now, if you focus only on one, for example school, then your other areas will be low performing which eventually will cause you to crash. As a former student athlete and an honor roll member, I felt like this was the key to success. That message alone is what should be the major takeaway of what today’s society calls our rat race of “success” in high school.  

   The beginning of this year I had a crazy schedule which consisted of 5 college classes, waking up at 5:45AM for sport driven morning workouts, after school extracurriculars going until 8:30PM and a ton of homework to do when I got home and ended up going to sleep around 2AM just to get up and do it all over again the next day. I felt very overwhelmed since I didn’t practice good habits in managing all this with my social and mental health. This bad cycle led to some major breakdowns and low performance in my social life and well-being. As I got busier with unhealthy habits, I learned that the only way I was going to succeed was through structure and a schedule. I found that the more I did, the more I wanted to do.  

    I interviewed GBHS “most likely to be the next Einstein,” Kylie Gillis, on the topic of sacrificing mental health for school and she said, “I definitely sacrifice my mental health along with my sleep for school every day. I tend to be one of those people who needs to put in a lot of studying to get good grades and I overdo it a lot. It’s especially challenging while playing a sport and having other things going on in our lives. The only way I have really found that makes it easier to calm down is taking a bit of a break once I get home before starting my homework, sometimes I will wake up early to do most of my studying. It is worth the hard work, but can be discouraging at times, so as a teenager it’s definitely hard to not take it too seriously!” We could all learn a thing or two from our school Einstein and how to balance our lifestyles at an academically challenging school. 

The takeaways: 

• prioritize your mental health! Long-term sacrificing that leads to low performance. 
• Taking breaks is okay and a part of the rat race to success. 
• Work hard, play hard.

   Additional reading:

The Importance of Mental Health Awareness in Schools (wgu.edu)

School Based Mental Health | Youth.gov