I would have done this post last week, but I caught the insanity. I, like the typical college student, am usually more susceptible to the illness I call “the insanity” around the beginning and end of a given semester. Fortunately, both modern and ancient science along with a spoonful of good old common sense have provided the humble mortal in all of us with a cure.

As usual, I ignored the first several symptoms of the insanity: my bedtime creeping back by two hours, the rising stress levels, forgetting to eat lunch. It wasn’t until I noticed that I had no clean clothes because I had not had even a moment to consider doing laundry that it hit me. I needed to stop screaming around. Anyone who knows me who took one look at me would tell you I was in “maniac mode”.

So I took a step back. For me this is the single hardest thing to do when I am stressed. Those of us who were raised to be the overachievers become addicted to being constantly busy. Having no time for anything else is our natural state. In a way, it means we don’t have to think. We don’t reflect because we don’t have time to. But if we don’t reflect, we don’t learn, and things never improve.

After that first initial step back, I sat down and (wait for it……) made a list. Lists are my ultimate stress-reducer. They let me to visually organize my life in a way in which allows me some control over it. Onto that list went everything I had to do in a given week: classes, clubs, jobs, responsibilities, etc. I made sure to include things like eating and sleeping and taking care of myself, since those things also take time. Then to each of those things I assigned the number of hours I estimated I needed to do that activity well over the course of one week. Then I added up the hours, and compared that number to the total number of hours in a week.

I was very close, with ten hours to spare by the time the week was out. But given that I always lose time here or there in transit between classes, briefly zoning out over my quantum mechanics, and over sleeping my alarm clock, I could tell that if some unexpected event cropped up, I wouldn’t have time to deal with it.

The long and short of it was that clearly I had taken on too much. I need eight hours of sleep a night or I don’t function efficiently. I’ve tried cutting out meal times by eating on the job, and that doesn’t work either. I knew that if I continued to over work myself, “the insanity” would turn into a real illness, and it would eventually interrupt my life and my education.

I needed to cut back on something. I know first-hand how hard cutting back can be. After years upon years of being raised by and with high achieving people, the pressure to excel is overwhelming at times. The idea of dropping a class fosters the same kind of guilt and stress in my mind as betraying a friend. I feel like a failure. Simply for dropping a class! Time for a reality check. I thought I was going to be fine this semester… three classes and thesis, two part-time jobs that looked good on my resume, one substantial extracurricular that made me look well-rounded. So how had I gone wrong? My over-achiever training keeps telling me I should be able to handle this.

What I had forgotten is that searching for a graduate program and studying for the GREs is time consuming, on the order of the time and energy required for a fifth class. Not to mention that I was now in senior year; there would be no more easy classes. Something had to go. In the end it was the third class that I had intended to take as an exploratory exercise that bit the dust. The over-achiever in me hated clicking that “drop class” button on the academic portal, but the class was cutting into the rest of my life, and it was very important that I get my other work done well, not simply done.

Once I had nixed the class and readjusted my schedule, things seemed to fall into place. There was now a fairly open weekend followed by a significant time break from activities midweek. There were enough hours to not only do my homework, but go to the gym five days a week and watch my favorite TV shows on Friday afternoons. I have stopped scheduling meetings over lunch, so I actually eat and enjoy my food and the company of my friends. And I can sleep, knowing that I have time to sleep and that I have my work done to my satisfaction. If there is a disaster of some kind, I have the time and energy to recover.

It has taken me years to learn to scale back. Occasionally I catch the insanity and forget for a while, but eventually I get a reality check from my laundry basket and remember. For me it is more important to be able to be satisfied with the work I have done than to meet the standards that seem to surround me, and the many, many standards I create for myself. Many of my own standards are short sighted and unrealistic; created by a stressed mind and fostered by a society that wants smart girls to achieve greatness. I spent most of my life never questioning these standards, and wondered why I never felt satisfied, even when I met them. It is one thing to be challenged, take up that challenge, and achieve something. It is another thing to abandon quality for quantity, and not assess why one challenge or accomplishment might be more important than another. I’m in college. I’m still young, and just barely beginning to explore what I might be able to contribute to the world. I have my whole life ahead of me to achieve greatness. I don’t need to finish it by midnight on Wednesday.