Photo courtesy of callcentrehelper.com | Staff Writer Emily Price asserts that in order to ensure your mental and physical help, it is imperative to organize your schedule. 

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There is a world where taking care of yourself is worthy of respect. That world is no longer reflected in ours. Somehow, resting when you need rest or eating when you are hungry has become absurd in a culture of go, go, go. I have many friends who have classes back-to-back from 11 a.m. to noon, noon to 1 p.m. and 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. leaving the idea of eating lunch to get lost. I too find myself skipping meals when I have to go to work right after class and then have a big test to study for after.

All-nighters are common among students of all ages, and they happen because work has to be completed, papers have to be written and studying has to be done.

This idea extends beyond physical limits to mental well-being. We tend to ignore ourselves when we feel overwhelmed or anxious. This leads to anxiety attacks, inability to sleep, symptoms of depression, obsessive compulsive tendencies and a lot more.

However, this is simply the world that we live in. A world where it is a continuous rush of do this and do that, a world where what you do is never enough and a world where we hurt ourselves to further ourselves. While the counter productivity is obvious when it is directly thought about, it rarely is and therefore, it has become accepted as a part of life.

There are ways to get things done that don’t involve skipping meals, staying up all night or ignoring unhealthy mental states. These ways aren’t easy or definitive, but they can seem so simple that we think we are already doing them. We must organize our lives and be responsible about that organization. The reason we end up skipping and cramming is that we spend our time on our phones, watching television or doing other mindless activities. The time we waste with the small and unimportant things in our lives could be used to start the paper you would spend all night writing or to eat the meal that you would’ve skipped. We would be able to do the things that are necessary for our physical and mental health.

Write out a rough schedule of what you plan to do for the day. Then make sure that you don’t spend the hour that you set out for studying looking through Twitter. If you are smart and diligent about the things that you have to do for school or work, then you can be responsible about the amount of sleep you get.

Once you are used to doing this, you can better judge when you need sleep, food or a good healthy cry. So, when your chemistry lab is too much, you know when you can step out to take a break because you can go to your professor’s office hours and catch up. The break is worth it if you are responsible about covering the small amount of work you miss. When you have a time set out to study for those classes that you have back-to-back, you can fit in time to pack a meal or a snack.

We do not have to go backward to go forward. If we can be more responsible about these things, we can simply go forward.

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Emily Price is a first-year psychology major and staff writer for the Newswire from Miamisburg, Ohio.