Spring Break is more than just a week of partying in South Florida. Midterms are over. The semester is halfway done. Students are the peak of the mountain that is the spring semester. Now, it's that much-needed time for college students to decompress from the stresses of the semester.
For most students, it's time to spend time with friends or family. For others, it's time to get a head start on that annoying final paper. Maybe it's even time to travel to a place one's never been before. But for some, it could just be time to stay in.
It's easy to feel bad when you see your friends from high school taking group pictures on the beach on social media and it's easy to feel lazy when you know you have a lot of deadlines coming up. Don't let these thoughts overwhelm you and ruin your vacation.
Spring break is about relaxing and everyone is different. Focus on what decompressing means to you.
For the introvert, a fast-paced vacation could be the opposite of unwinding. And the idea of having to work on an assignment can also be stressful, for obvious reasons.
When students feel stressed out or overwhelmed during the spring semester, they think, "Just wait until spring break, just wait until spring break." The semester takes away from the hobbies that keep us alive. Students think they'll have time to do all the things they can't do during the semester and set goals for themselves during the week, such as, "I'm finally gonna finish that book I bought last month," or "I'm going to going to work on my Spanish." Unfortunately, during a time focused on relaxing, not all those goals are met, which stresses students out even more.
If having a lot of reminders and goals at a time makes you anxious, don't.
However, students can feel like they're wasting this precious week of reprieve when they wake up at noon every day and get nothing done.
But that's ok. Spring Break is not about meeting goals or kicking stuff off your bucket list. Sure, those things can be done during that time, but it was made for students to relax.
How is the time best spent with you, emotionally, not productively? If you burnt yourself out over-socializing or over-working, will you come back to school refreshed? Or just as burnt out as when you left?
When you return, you want to feel like you just took a long nap on the words softest bed. Focus on that feeling. How can you achieve that?
Don't worry about your friend who did a one-week study abroad. Focus on you.
So don't feel bad when that over-friendly professor asks what you did over spring break, and you say, "Nothing."
