This past alumni weekend, I again received that favorite piece of post-graduate advice: that the “key to success” in college lies in how well you can “find balance” between your grades, extracurricular activities and social life. Good advice, to be sure, but each undergraduate is left to figure out the details. Our ability to “balance” determines not only our popularity, grades and community recognition but also the quality of our emotional lives, interpersonal relationships and overall mental and physical health. Yet students at the University, even more than those at your average American college, often approach the idea of balance with the maxim “work hard, play hard.” This sentiment — visibly pursued and endorsed by many in our community — often exacerbates the health challenges faced by college students. I suggest we adopt an attitude for “balance” that raises our likelihood of achieving mental health rather than putting it at risk.
The “work hard, play hard” sentiment refers to an ideal where students party “hard” but still maintain an excellent GPA. Even if you don’t subscribe to this approach, you probably know many who do. On its surface, it sounds like a reasonable lifestyle: you are a multidimensional person who approaches your personal life with the same passion and zeal as your academic life. You get good grades in class and binge drink with your friends on the weekends. Moreover, you attend a school that — as you are constantly reminded — was ranked as Playboy’s top party school last year as well as U.S. News & World Report’s second-best public college. All things considered, you must have this whole “balance” thing down, and other students might feel compelled to follow your formula for success. Unfortunately, this strategy is no guarantee for the kind of emotional and social stability that a psychologist or neuroscientist might recommend.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention cites several of the biggest mental health and safety challenges facing college students on a daily basis. These include “social and sexual pressures, the temptation of readily available alcohol [and] drugs,” as well as stress from managing classes, friends, athletics and leadership positions. “Work hard, play hard” as a college lifestyle not only fails to effectively combat these issues but also usually worsens them.
A college environment in which people endorse this mentality can easily become toxic, where students feel pressured not only to work “harder” but also to match this with increasingly risky or destructive behaviors. Such a lifestyle is incompatible for many — particularly those students already prone to psychological instability — and can be quite dangerous. On the less pathological end of the spectrum, you have those perpetually exhausted students who alternate between the gym, the library and partying and simply have “no time for sleep.” At its worst, you have tragic stories similar to Shelley Goldsmith’s, a promising student and Jefferson Scholar who investigators believe died of drug-related causes last month. While blaming destructive behavior and poor mental health on a motto is simplistic, it’s clear that many University students need healthier strategies for balancing the various domains of their lives.
So what are more scientifically verified methods for juggling our academic, extracurricular, social responsibilities? We need a standard of success that, when met, provides for satisfactory mental and physical health habits. Sufficient sleep (seven to nine hours per night) and a nutritious diet are essentials, but certain emotional and social habits must also be cultivated. To take the mentally healthy route, we cannot define social balance merely as hours or intensity of partying. Rather, it is achieved by one’s ability to maintain meaningful, positive relationships with others.
As psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes, a key to emotional and social stability is to “improve our relatedness.” So instead of partying for its own sake, focus on investing in the most significant relationships in your life — friends or significant others. Make a conscious effort to hold positive, substantive conversations with the friends you deem most valuable. Whether this occurs over dinner, as you hop between parties or during a stay-at-home movie night is irrelevant. For your schoolwork, use positive emotions such as optimism and self-efficacy to motivate yourself rather than negative ones like inadequacy, anxiety and fear. As Haidt and other psychologists have observed, small changes like these sum to very tangible mental benefits when applied over weeks or semesters — benefits in the form of decreased stress, anxiety and depression.
Student emphasis on psychological health mitigates the pressure to perform dangerous behaviors and alleviates some of the harmful, negative emotions in our lives. The “work hard, play hard” ethic is essentially a matter of mental health. It asks us to navigate both the intellectual challenges of higher education and the emotional and social ones of our personal life. These are critical factors in the quality of our mental health, and how we organize them — i.e. “achieve balance” — helps determine our mental well-being.
George Knaysi is an Opinion columnist for The Cavalier Daily. His columns run Tuesdays.
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