By Taylor Owens ’20

Dear Taylor,

I hope you can help me. Recently I have been bombarded with school work, and honestly I am having trouble handling it. Every day I feel like the work gets piled higher, and I can hardly keep up. I already spend lots of time on my work, but I feel, no matter how much time I spend on it, I can’t get it done. No matter how much sleep I get –which, to be fair, is hardly any– I feel exhausted. Taylor, please help me figure out how to stop this onslaught of stress. 

-A Stressed Mess

Hello Stressed Mess!

I am sorry to hear about how you are feeling, but unsurprisingly, I can relate. I am fairly certain every student at Hill has felt this way at one point or another, and anyone who says otherwise should send an email to Mr. Gettings because you are a LIAR. 

Listen, I am not going to tell you to fix your stress by meditating for two hours a day, or by going out on regular nature hikes, or by eating something lame like spinach. The simple solution is to eliminate all reasons that cause stress. Math test tomorrow? Drop the class. Too much homework? Don’t do it, and tell the teacher that you can’t do it because of religious reasons. Fighting with your boyfriend/girlfriend? Murder them. People on you hall too loud? Murder them. 

Maybe you’ve caught on, or maybe not, but you can’t just eliminate everything that causes stress. Even if you dropped out of school to live at home, you would just have new causes of stress: fridge too far from bed, Mom won’t let you turn on the thermostat, you have to take out the trash on Wednesdays. The best you can do is try to prevent stress. Think of it this way: you can put on sunscreen before you go outside, or you can try and lather aloe all over your nasty sunburn. And trust me, I know this; when I don’t have a spray tan I am quite pasty. 

It seems that you are stressed specifically about your workload. Personally, I have found that the best way to prevent stress from my work is tackling it as soon as I get it. Unfortunately however, I do not usually do that because it is hard and I have the time management of a toad (I am assuming they don’t have time management in an inoffensive way). Start by writing down all of your assignments on a piece of paper, ordering them from “someone will hunt me down if I do not complete this in the next 10 minutes” to “I’m not even sure that I will still be a teenager when this is due.” Anything that is due that evening, do it fast with the intention of getting it done. Anything not urgently due, promise yourself at least two minutes of work on it, because if you can give it two minutes of hard work, then you probably can just finish most of it, and if not, then you got a little head start on it.

And make sure you set yourself a bedtime and stick to it. Your teachers might tell you this, but they are just trying to get you to sleep more. As a student, I understand that if you didn’t do any work during study hall, you probably aren’t going to finish an essay at three in the morning. So you might as well make sure you’ve carved out time to rewatch the same episodes of “The Office” for the thousandth time. Last but not least, just remember the golden rule: If you have three major assessments on one day, you are always allowed to push one of them back. 

With love,

Taylor 

To reach out to Taylor with your question, emails us at [email protected]. Note: everyone who submits a question is kept entirely anonymous throughout the process.