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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Start taking care of yourself. Really, do it. It’s time.

We all have our breaking points. We all have a threshold that, if crossed, will cause us to feel overwhelmed and defeated.

As college students, many of us toe the line of these breaking points daily. We flirt with the idea of a mental breakdown and entertain the thought of giving up sleep entirely so we can meet all the goals we set for ourselves. This, unfortunately, is the curse of the overachiever: it causes us to push ourselves until it is physically impossible for us to push any harder.

When we came to UF as freshmen, most of us likely joined clubs, Greek life, intramural sports teams, volunteer organizations and so on. We likely fell in love with each and every organization we joined and deemed each of them essential to our college experience. As we progressed through college, we tacked on more and more. Internships, harder classes, a second major, more clubs, honor societies, a relationship. The list kept growing as we took advantage of every opportunity in front of us.

Regrettably, we didn’t realize we were overloading ourselves, and, soon enough, we found ourselves dangerously close to our breaking points.

Despite many of us often recognize our sanity decreasing and find our lack of personal time alarming, we continue to allow ourselves to be trapped within our obligations. This is something we can’t keep letting ourselves do.

Eventually, the things once near and dear to your heart no longer have a place. The things that used to consume our minds are now just a thought in the back of our heads, taking away focus from more important tasks at hand. In other words, as we mature, we start to outgrow the things that helped us grow.

Rather than stringing along our obligations, we need to let them go. We need to let them go to make way for ourselves.

We understand the idea of relinquishing yourself of nonessential obligations seems amiss. Aren’t we supposed to be building our resumes at all costs? Aren’t we supposed to be killing ourselves to get the best grades possible? Aren’t we supposed to be taking every advantage put in front of us?

In short: yes. But, we can’t do so at the cost of our happiness. As we continue to add on more obligations without filtering through our old ones, we tend to forget about the most important obligation of all: the obligation we have to ourselves.

A lot of us feel indebted to our initial commitments. It makes sense. We owe them a lot. We wouldn’t have been able to get as far as we have without the friends we made initially, nor would we have been offered leadership positions, jobs or internships without the initial entry-level lines on our resume. But all good things need to come to an end.

We need to start being selfish with our time and come to terms with the fact as we mature, the things and organizations we value need to as well. It might seem beneficial to infinite lines of continuous involvement on your resume, but is it really worth it if you end up putting in half the necessary effort because you’re stretching yourself too thin? We think not.

If we really want to succeed, we need to put ourselves first. We need to have time to check in with ourselves mentally and make sure we are sleeping enough, eating right and, yes, even enjoying some social interaction outside of club meetings and study groups. We need to remember to be people.

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That being said, don’t be afraid to let go of the things no longer serving you. Don’t stay committed to things that have become nothing more than simply another thing on your to-do list. Re-evaluate your life with yourself as your number one obligation.

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