As students, we lead extremely busy lives. Between classes, including the time we spend outside of classes doing work, holding down a part-time job, and maintaining relationships with our friends and families, it’s hard to carve out enough time to eat and sleep as much as we should. It’s important that we remember to take breaks and time for ourselves, which aren’t necessarily one and the same.
Taking a break could mean going out for lunch and leaving your textbooks behind, or grabbing coffee with a friend between classes. While these are things we enjoy doing, they still require energy and interaction and so they may still contribute to the general demands on our time and energy.
Taking time for you means taking a step back and choosing to spend some time alone. Too much isolation can be a bad thing, but a healthy amount of time can help to reduce stress and leave you feeling refreshed and more prepared to deal with all of the other things in your life that require attention.
The idea of psychological detachment refers to the feeling that you are mentally disengaged from work when you’re not there. For students, our “work” is our education; the boundaries between school and home are fluid in that we often take our work home with us, doing our class-work away from the physical school setting. Our education is one of the largest things going on in our lives, taking up the majority of our time and energy.
According to Sabine Sonnentag, “Being psychologically detached from work entails both refraining from job-related activities […] and not thinking about job-related issues.” For many students, school seeps into every aspect of our lives; we talk about it, we think about it, and it’s always lurking in the back of our minds even when we’re doing something else. Sonnentag cites empirical studies showing that psychological detachment is beneficial for well-being, including increased enthusiasm for work and the absence of burnout. This evidence suggests that taking some time to disengage and focus on ourselves can actually help us to be more engaged and potentially more productive when we are devoting our time to schoolwork.
School is arguably more intense than a full-time job. If the average student were to calculate how many hours in a given week are spent either in class or completing coursework, I would estimate that it’s at least 35. Depending on your program of study, it may vary, but for argument’s sake let’s equate simply the time spent as equal to a full-time job.
Having worked full-time over the summer, I definitely feel that school is more intense just because learning requires so much more energy and brainpower than task completion. At work, most tasks are anticipated and I already know how to do them, which makes them less intimidating. For example, creating a work schedule and checking it against vacation bookings and placement requests takes significantly less time and energy than writing an essay because the schedule doesn’t require me to think critically.
Research has shown that people who are able to disengage from their work in off-hours are more satisfied, experience less emotional exhaustion, and have fewer other symptoms of psychological strain, including poor sleep. Most students can relate to feeling emotionally and psychologically exhausted from school at one point or another, with the ironic result that we have a hard time sleeping, and so the cycle of exhaustion carries on.
While it may seem counterintuitive—spend less time on school! You’ll achieve more!—this approach focuses more on quality than quantity of time spent. If you’re able to be more focused, more efficient, and more refreshed when you’re working because you’ve taken some downtime to allow your brain and body to decompress and recover, chances are you’ll feel better overall.