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Excessive Work and Its Effects on Student Mental Health

Posted on: July 8, 2017

Joshua is a university student specialising in architecture. All of his friends are out for a night out on the town enjoying the public places and foods. It is almost three am and they are still not at home. What is even more ironic is that Joshua is still wide awake and working on his project proposal. The deadline is fast approaching and there are other obligations which he needs to cater to in the beginning of the week. He has been awake for the last 63 hours with the help of medical stimulants, coffee and anything that could spike his attention. Not afraid to use them, even if it might be unhealthy as long as it helps him how to increase focus.

Excessive Work & its Effects on Student Mental Health

Mark is a freshman in computer science. He has reputation amongst his family to excessively overachieve his goals and targets. University assignments are a bit more gruelling compared to his anticipated expectations. They require far more time and effort for them to be completed comprehensively. This is one of the reasons why he spends over forty hours a week toiling away to complete his schoolwork. Most of that time is spent in front of computer screens compiling programs and learning different programming languages. Constantly being in the seated position in front of laptops and computers has taken its toll on his health. Even more punishing are its affects on the importance of mental health. He often went to the university counsellor with his student mental health issues but most of the time he found that the counsellor was either not available or arduously busy with other matters.

Identifying Student Mental Health Conditions

There is a fine line between working efficiently and being overworked. Wearing yourself out excessively fast can have drastic reverberations on overall student mental health. It can cause problems associated with memory. It could also lead to difficulty achieving optimum levels of concentration. One of the main constituents of a positive psychological state is sleep. Biting off more than you can chew can lead to trouble falling asleep. The quality of the sleep can possibly diminish causing people to walk in their sleep. These are all signs that your body needs to relax. Some people do not have difficulty sleeping but experience a change in their eating habits. Eating too much or too little causing drastic weight gain or weight loss in a short period of time is another sign that you have too much on your mind. You need to take one thing at a time and slow down. Anxiety can also lead to overwhelming feelings. Being easily frightened or feeling like a nervous wreck could be from working too hard for too long on that dissertation proposal.

Maintaining an Optimal Psychological State

The first thing you can do to calm your nerves is to declutter all your electronic gadgets. From your cell phone, PDA, personal PC and any and all other screens which you use organise their operations. Dedicate each one for a specific purpose and lose all the surplus devices. The more electronic devices you have will only cause a plethora of stress trying to keep everything up to date.

Maintain a schedule. We all have those obligations which we have to perform on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Even if your schedule is not etched in stone at least know when you have to be where. This way if something unscheduled pops up at the last moment you will be able designate a portion of your time keeping in mind the rest of the obligations.

Reserve some time all by yourself on a weekly basis where you do whatever it is that you find entertaining. This will calm your nerves and give you that boost of enthusiasm related to your work and career goals.