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Our western culture of individualism, competition, and personal merit tends to glamorize the idea of working oneself to the breaking point, and creates a constant pressure to be productive 24/7. The debilitating effects of this “workaholic” mentality become especially prominent during endeavors like college application and admission season, during which we are literally pitted against each other in a fight to earn validation from a handful of “esteemed individuals,” and, in a sense, are forced to equate our sense of identity and self-worth with exam scores, GPAs, and the narratives we build in our personal statement essays.
Although this pressure is a great motivator, in excess, it erodes our mental stability, displaces our priorities, and damages our ability to be truly live life, fully present and connected.
During seasons like these that demand so much of our focus, energy, and time, we are susceptible to dehumanizing ourselves into perfect machines built solely to work on the prospect of college and only college (whether it be on applications, AP classes, overextending ourselves in extracurriculars, etc). College applications force to focus much of our attention on the illusions of time - our past (accomplishments, family history, personal struggles) and keep us anxious about the ambiguity of the future. We grow obsessed with these pursuits and lose sight of the present moment - the only thing that we truly know and can truly control. This is what causes us to neglect our bodies, emotions, and spirits - all of which operate in the present, not the past or future.
When you peel back all of the layers of identity created through external displays, you find that at our core, we are still human beings with needs and a physical, mental, and emotional fragility that must be tended to. This fragility is not something to be afraid of - in fact, rejecting it makes us even more fragile, because we are denying ourselves the needs that our bodies our asking us for. Let this page be a gentle reminder of this truth: just as you cannot fill another cup if yours is empty, you cannot continue appealing to the expectations of others (whether it be your friends, family, or college) if you cannot first appeal to the expectations, needs, and desires you set for yourself.
This is American psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. In essence, this is a model of psychological health, which suggests that mental and emotional wellness is achieved and maintained through the fulfillment of innate human needs. Each successive level of needs
cannot be achieved without first fulfilling the tier(s) beneath them.
Notice how Self-actualization, the category under which college applications would most accurately fall, is the last need to be fulfilled. Yet, we tend to neglect all of the needs beneath it as we desperately pursue the top of the pyramid. It seems so simple and so obvious, though we lose sight of it all too easily - you can’t climb this pyramid if it is built of blocks that are unstable and loosely held together.
This is the essence of what it means to take care of your mental health: practicing deep awareness of your physical and emotional needs, and taking the necessary actions in order to fulfill them.
The power of being gentle with yourself, and in turn knowing, providing, and asking for what you need. This is the key to preventing burnout and mental breakdowns before they can happen.
The word, compassion, is derived from the Latin word compati, which means “to suffer with.” In order to suffer with someone, you must be conscious of three things - their suffering, your suffering, and the interconnectedness and commonality of your lived experiences. When your heart is filled with compassion, you resonate with the struggles of another human, because you are no stranger to the suffering that they are experiencing. Your heart yearns to comfort them and reassure them that everything is going to be okay. What if we showed ourselves this same love, care, and concern that we give to others?
By the same token, self-compassion is the act of acknowledging and warmly embracing our suffering, understanding our emotions and what they reveal about our needs, and tending to ourselves by providing ourselves with those needs. Self-compassion is not selfish or self-indulgent; in fact, it is quite the opposite. By befriending our feelings and how to take care of our emotional needs, we avoid the toxic, self-pitiful cycle of self-criticism and using unhealthy coping mechanisms to avoid our pain. Acts of self-compassion and self-care allow us to feel whole and valuable as we are, and let go of the unrealistic expectations that inhibit our contentment with ourselves.
That being said, we need to change our narrative about self-care. Although it is heartening to see that our world has grown more open-minded towards the once-radical concept of taking care of oneself, the term “self-care” has become so loosely used and capitalized upon that it has lost its true gravity and value. Self-care is not a commodity, a luxury, or yet another burden on our to-do lists that we can keep neglecting “until we have the time for it, or “when I’m about to burn out.” Self-care and self-compassion are a lifestyle - they are the lifestyle - and they are what fuel us to consistently rise to all of the challenges and bask in all of the joys that life presents us with.
In order to take care of our emotional needs, we first need to be able to identify and name our feelings. Our emotions are complex and more than “sad,” “mad,” or “glad,” and we need to pinpoint and articulate what exact emotions are passing through our body, and what is at the root of those emotions. Are we “just sad,” or are we really feeling hopeless (naming the emotion) about our future because (naming the root) we’ve been watching college acceptance videos on Youtube and spiraling into a toxic cycle of comparison and self-doubt? The latter provides more insight into what we are feeling, why we are feeling it, and what we need in this moment.
~ coping skills and additional resources ~