We college students are now somewhere smack in the middle of our spring semester. The luckier students are just getting back from Spring Break. This is a stressful time. Maybe after your first semester, you decided that you were not busy enough and wanted to take on more or harder classes. Maybe you also found a new club (or five) or activities you wanted to join on top of those hard classes. In addition, maybe your friendships and social groups are changing — maybe you thought at the beginning of second semester that you would remain close with all of your friends from first semester, but with all the new classes and activities you and your peers have taken on, you are slowly growing apart from them, and you feel friendless and lonesome in a time already embedded with other stresses.

I (now a sophomore in college) will be honest and say that around this time about a year ago was possibly one of the hardest periods in my life. After a solid first semester with good grades and (what I felt like) a pretty stable social life, I suddenly found myself in a situation where I felt that I had no support. Everyone else seemed to be joining new groups of friends and finding their place, while I was too busy under the pressure of taking a very hard course load and had very little time to immerse myself in the social life for which I had hoped. These feelings of loneliness, combined with the actual stress I was experiencing, equaled a very rough time. Those few weeks involved many tears, sleepless nights, over-indulging in food, and more than a few panic attacks.

Thankfully, I am now doing so much better. I have learned to be much more reasonable with myself in terms of what classes I can handle. I have joined a few new activities which keep me busy when I want to be and have provided me with many new friends. I feel like I have truly found some of my best friends this year, whom I can count on for basically anything, and make even the most stressful of days more enjoyable.

But, in the past few weeks, I have felt those nostalgic feelings of mid-semester stress slowly creeping up on me again. This is mostly due to the fact that I have been so much busier and my classes have been harder. I have not been able to accomplish everything I have wanted to and have not done as well on certain tests and assignments. However, the fact that I am stressed has actually made me scared. If I am extremely content with my classes, activities and social life, then why am I so stressed? This feeling has been hard for me because I want to be happy, I want to feel much more in place than I was at this time last year, I want to feel like everything is perfect.

Amid the combined stress of me and all of my friends, I have realized something that I feel like college students forget around this time — I am a human. Not a robot. Yes, it seems like something easy to remember, but in these past few weeks I have treated myself like I am a machine. The past few weeks have been hard, not just for me, but for everyone. Last week, I beat myself up over not doing well on an exam. I have been working non-stop, taking barely any breaks, and I literally stopped eating because I lost my appetite and was too stressed to even leave the room. I have noticed many of my friends feeling stressed as well. I read an article from a fellow writer at my own school last week that basically summed up exactly how I was feeling a year ago. There was a suicide on my own campus last week, which has shaken up me and many of my fellow students.

I finally came to terms with the question: Why are we doing this to ourselves? There is so much pressure in college for everything to go our way, to be able to fit in, to get perfect grades, and so on. But if it makes you feel the way we are feeling — it is really not worth it. Why should we sacrifice our health and well-being just for academics? What makes us feel like we are machines who have to accomplish anything that is asked of us? We are humans. Now that I have finally realized this, I am making every effort to ensure both my friends and I are taking care of ourselves the way we deserve to be. Here are some steps I have taken (that I did not take last year) to ensure that I take care of myself, which have already made me feel so much better. I suggest you take these as well.

Please, please eat. Yes, dining hall food can be terrible, and may not be worth leaving the room to eat — but you are not going to function unless you have the appropriate nutrients in your body. As stress has caused me to lose my appetite, I have figured that I may as well just skip meals and use the time to catch up on work or take naps instead. Please do not do this. The more I did it, the less enthusiastic I was about eating in general, and it got to a point where I realized that I was eating an average of around one meal a day, and I was not feeling any better about stress. If you have been working for too long, take a break and eat. Go to the dining hall with friends, and make it something to look forward to.

Please get sleep. Yes, academics are important, but you are not going to work well if you are not well-rested. Do not beat yourself up over needing to pull an all-nighter, but at least do everything you can to make up for it — take a nap, or let yourself skip a party the upcoming Friday night to catch up on sleep. After consistently staying up until around 4 or 5 a.m. every night last year, I realized that staying up those extra hours was just not worth it — I was not doing my best work at that time of night when my eyes could barely stay open, and I would end up sleeping through class many times anyway and not get to turn in those assignments that I worked so hard on. Trust me, sleep is much more important than a grade on one homework assignment.

Please do not be afraid to open up about your feelings. Last year, I was honestly embarrassed to admit how stressed I was — I felt like it signaled that I was weak and that I could not handle college. But, college is hard for everyone. You are not the only one who is feeling the way you are, and there are so many people to talk to. Share your feelings with your friends, and let them vent to you as well —there is nothing better than knowing you are not the only one who feels the way you do. Talk to your professors — they are much more likely to forgive you for a missed deadline if you take the time to get to know them and let them know what is going on in your life. Cry to your parents and friends from home over the phone or on FaceTime. Use campus counseling services if you have to. You are not alone in this, and trying to handle everything on your own is not going to make the situation any better.

Please, above everything, take time for yourself. You may feel committed to attend everything and anything going on, but you are forgetting that you are a human, and cannot be in 1,000 places at once. Trust me, people will understand—they have been there before and do not want you to feel the same way. Do not beat yourself up over missing a club meeting, a deadline, or a social outing — you are your number one priority. You are a human, just like everyone else, and you deserve to treat yourself like one.