A world where students are told from birth that they need to be academically successful, where students, as they get older, feel academically pressured and judged by their peers, is often a common reality for many students right now. In an environment where academic success is the priority and the expectation, many students often grow stressed and start to develop unhealthy mental habits. As a result, this engenders a culture where students are toxic and are willing to do anything to succeed, while those at the bottom are constantly getting stepped on to be exploited and interests and passions are given up for the sake of academic achievement. While admittedly, academics is a large part of our lives and a large contributing factor of our future, it is important to learn to have boundaries and build a balance of our work and personal lives. Moreover, in an environment built by competition, it is easy for students to be overwhelmed by other people’s progress, but learning to to be unaffected by other people’s progress and taking control and inheriting belief in your own life, is an important step to cultivating a healthy mental habit. One of the ways to achieve this is to have a healthy hobby that you find enjoyable. While this can range from any activity, from drawing, to singing, to even playing a sport, it is important to check whether this hobby is unhealthy or healthy in the first place. Where a healthy habit would be one that you could do to relax and wind down while also performing your necessary responsibilities, an unhealthy habit might be one that might lead to destructive behaviors like addiction, which can disrupt your academic performance as well. The idea is to have a perfect balance between personal life and academic life, while concomitantly succeeding in those both areas. Hobbies are not only something that helps you relax and find joy in a busy life, it's also something that can help you keep your identity, personality, and freedom, as you are the one that creates the expectations, and you are the one that decides where to go with it. This type of freedom is unseen in many academic settings and is thus important to maintain through a healthy hobby. Another way to achieve a healthy mental state is through controlling the social environment around you. In a competitive setting, a large factor that disrupts our mental health can be those around you, typically through the judgment and competition of them. Therefore, keeping a healthy social environment, growing relationships with those you like and cutting off those who harm you, is an important step to having a healthy mental state.
- Jason Shin
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