Dani Blum | Stress test

The Danalyst | Even when we’re stuck in the midst of midterms, it shouldn’t feel like we can’t take a break

By Dani Blum 10/06/14 11:51pm

L ast Sunday, I woke up, got ready to hit the library and realized I had no work to do. I had woken up early to do work the previous day — my schedule was clear and I’m one of the lucky few who doesn’t have midterms until the end of October. It was the first free time I’d had in a while. When friends texted me to come study with them, I brought a book I’d been meaning to read for a while and plopped down with them at a table in Fisher Fine Arts. They brought out their laptops and freaked out about English essays. I sank into Michael Cunningham .

What struck me was how guilty I felt. I could practically see the cartoon steam coming out of my friends’ ears while they typed. I, on the other hand, settled into a really good work of fiction. I had heard horror stories about people falling asleep in GSRs and kids crying in recitations. I felt like I wasn’t allowed to be an exception. I couldn’t admit to people that I wasn’t stressed, much less flaunt that I had leisure time. Ironically enough, I felt that the library was the worst place for reading.

It’s difficult to fuse a 10,000-person student body into a cohesive culture. Stress serves as a way of uniting us. We identify ourselves by stress — we’re all in difficult courses, the theory goes, so we should all be worried about our work. When we run into people on Locust, the standard, “How are you?” response is either, “Fine,” or “Stressed!”

These shouldn’t be the only two options, but stress creates a mob mentality. We talk about how overwhelmed we are, and then we feel left out if we’re not equally as scrambled. If we haven’t worked until midnight like our friends have, then we feel like we’re not adequate students. There’s a general feeling that if you’re not stressed out of your mind, you’re doing something wrong.

By constantly talking about our stress, we contribute to an unhealthy culture. We can’t help but overthink our assignments and we put so much pressure on ourselves that we can’t get much done. It’s difficult to separate our work and our expectations.

Maybe that’s why we stress out so much. Whatever the reason, though, we need to accept that panic doesn’t have to be our default emotion. There will be days when we don’t have a lot of work, and that’s okay. It’s acceptable to not always be doing something.

At Penn, the norm is to overbook ourselves. We feel wrong if we’re not bouncing from one activity to another. But this creates an unhealthy environment — nobody can be “on it” 100 percent of the time. We can’t live up to the perfect image we create on our GCals. It’s downright damaging to be active 24/7. If we push ourselves to the max every day, we’re bound to burn out eventually. The problem is that so many of us would rather overextend than admit our limitations.

Maybe the reason for this is that we’re so goal-oriented that we channel our academics into our dreams for the future. We learn, but with the intent of getting into medical school or landing that Google gig. We create too distinct of a barrier between work and play — and yes, while a lot of us genuinely love our classes, we tend to leave that realm of intellectualism after we finish our homework. We don’t let ourselves bliss out academically.

A lot of Penn feels like oscillating between extremes. We push ourselves to make every event exciting or important or an accomplishment, from six-hour study sessions to taking charge in our extracurriculars to going hard at parties. We don’t allow ourselves enough breathing room. We’re all for, “work hard, play hard” — Amy Gutmann even said so during Convocation — but we don’t allow ourselves a chance to just stop and take a break. We shouldn’t have to hide our methods of relaxation. Sometimes, we need to be boring.

Dani Blum is a College freshman from Ridgefield, Conn. Her email address is kblum@sas.upenn.edu. “The Danalyst” appears every Tuesday.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.