HOW WILL I GET IT ALL DONE!

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Last week I promised to address end-of-term panic mode. First off, if you experience a real panic disorder, of course you consult appropriate professional care.

Most often for students, however, panic mode means high anxiety about getting the course requirements completed and doing well on assignments and exams. This anxiety is not only unpleasant it also interferes with self-care and academic efficiency.

These two affected areas, self-care and academic efficiency, are connected. Neglecting one can affect the other in a downward spiral. So let’s address both.

Self-care Kit for End-of-Term Stress

The key is to be creative: When you are tempted to cut back on self-care to gain academic grinding time, get creative about how you can gain the self-care benefit through shorter alternative activities. Take ten minutes now to read through these suggestions and note which can benefit you.

  • List your support team and identify who would be most useful to you–counselling, student support services, library, tutor, peer tutoring, study buddies, instructor, strategist.
  • Schedule connection with the most relevant support. This may be a quick call to ground you or to get a last minute tip. It may be a check-in for exam-writing techniques and dealing with exam anxiety.
  • Schedule an activity or commitment for right after the course ends.
  • This reminds you that life does go on after the final exam.
  • The body is your friend: Eat well. Sleep well. Stretch, run, bike or . . . . You may reduce your time on some activities here, but do what is best for your performance over the next two or three weeks. All nighters, not so much.
  • The five-minute stretch after a forty-minute focus or the 30-second head clearing after each problem will gain you clarity and time. 
  • Check your mental and spiritual hygiene stays.
  • If it’s not already scheduled, build in getting outdoors each day. Even if it’s only watering the plants on the balcony, or walking the dog.
  • Build in reinforcers for attending to self-care. These can be as brief as a 10-second self-endorsement.
  • Build in reinforcers for academic time-on-task. These, too, can be as brief as a 10-second self-endorsement.
  • Take 10 at the end of each day to review, endorse, and adapt the next day’s schedule.

End-of-Term Academic Angst 

Here is where your self-care looks at what you are anxious about academically. To address that fear of not doing as well academically as you would like:

  • Make a list of the worst case. Then address what you can do if that happens. Eg., apply to a different post-grad program or different law school. Work while you bone up for the next Red Seal exam; hire a tutor  or strategist in the meantime. Or enrol in a summer make-up course to rewrite the Grade XII exam. Or choose an alternate career path–housecleaning, pet care, while you figure out what to do next.
  • Now ask yourself how probable that worst case  is. Look at your marks so far. Look at what they will be if you continue to get the same grades on the work done so far. If you’re at a 1.5 average in a STEM program, the worst-case probability is pretty high. So look at how to withdraw or defer. Seek out academic advice now, not later, so that you meet required deadlines. 

However, If you’re at a 2.0 average and are targeting a 2.5, then your academic strategy is to get as much of the work done as is realistically possible to at least the same standard.

  • If the problem is that you fear you aren’t going to meet deadlines, grab your scheduler and work backwards from deadline dates. 

Use the course rubrics in the syllabus to make sure that you will cover all of the requirements for each course that you can. You don’t want to lose easy points by having the wrong margins, or not showing your work.

Schedule strategically. You may end up spending very little time on work that has less weight on the final grade, for example.

  • BUT ALSO MAKE SURE THAT YOU AREN’T WASTING PRECIOUS TIME POLISHING THE DOG. Set realistic, doable standards for the work you are completing. This is hard for perfectionists, so endorse when you catch yourself overpolishing, take a breath, and back to your strategic, realist performance.
  • Most important is to take the long view. Maybe you won’t reach your beginning-of-term goals. You have got this far, and you will bear some disappointment, then redirect and five years from now will likely notice that the 3.9 instead of the 4.0, or the 1.5 that meant changing programs, were not the end of a meaningful existence.

The takeaways on both self-care and academic end-of-term strategy, then, are

  • Maintain both self-care and academic performance. To do this,
  • Get creative,
  • Get strategic,
  • Be realistic, and
  • Take the long view.

Much of my work with students is helping them fine-tune their self-care and academic strategic plans. Let me know what works for you, what hasn’t worked, and where we need to go from here. [email protected] .

The information in this blog cannot take the place of support from your own mental health professional or community health resources. Reach out to them. And IF YOU ARE IN CRISIS, PLEASE DIAL 911.