From a young age, I always felt productivity was a focal point in my life. Even while growing up through elementary and middle school, I consistently felt the burden of feeling the need to be doing something all the time. Whether it was reading or doing some sort of homework, I felt I couldn’t take a break unless I knew for a fact that there wasn’t something else needing to be done, like studying for a quiz instead of watching a movie.

Towards the end of my freshman year, I began to feel extremely overwhelmed in a way that I had not yet experienced. I remember scrolling through TikTok, watching people study for hours and questioning why I wasn’t doing the same. I began setting unrealistic goals for myself and not setting out any downtime. These expectations were further validated when I got a job earlier this year. With an influx of workload, I didn’t change my routine to match events that arose like family problems, a part-time job and harder classes in my life. I was so obsessed with being productive that I began to lose motivation. When finals week came around last semester, I found myself in a state of constant anxiety. I vividly remember getting home from work at 10 p.m. on a school night and sitting at my dining room table working on a homework assignment for AP World History, and falling asleep in the middle of reading a book. For many years I thought the only way to be successful was to drown myself in tasks that were never fully achievable because they were extremely unrealistic. My self-worth was dependent on my productivity, which caused me to question my mental health and essentially everything else in my life. My social life began to diminish as I prioritized work and school. Although it is good to keep school in high standards, without a healthy balance of work and rest, the meaning of the results became less valuable to me. My parents never  expected me to get good grades or have everything under full control , but it felt like the person putting the most pressure on me was myself.