Everyone loves to tell college students to find “work-life balance.” Buy a planner, time-block your day, or prioritize better. But here’s the truth: I don’t have a work-life balance. Most of us don’t. My phone lights up with Slack faster than it does with texts from my friends, and even when I’m technically “done” for the day, I’m not actually done. The deadlines don’t respect bedtime, the emails pile up like they’re breeding overnight, and my brain doesn’t exactly let me clock out.
The numbers back it up: about 76% of college students report moderate to high stress within just a 30-day period, and over half of us admit to burnout. It’s not just me panicking at 2 a.m. over something out of my control; it’s practically the campus soundtrack. And while a 9-to-5 job lets you shut your laptop at 6 p.m.and maybe even make it to the gym, college life means sprinting from class to e-board meetings, trying to wedge in assignments in between, and always being “on.” There is no “off.”
Take last Wednesday, for example. Usually it’s back-to-back chaos, but this for once I only had two classes and actual free time. I was thrilled. I put on Grey’s Anatomy, baked focaccia (because baking is my therapy), and even started cleaning. For an hour, I felt like I had a life outside of the grind. Then my phone blew up. Both of my e-boards were in crisis mode, and of course I was the one who stepped in. Don’t get me wrong, I love my e-boards, but juggling two different groups melting down, my mom calling to say goodnight, and cramps from my period all at once wasn’t exactly peaceful. By 7 p.m., I was exhausted, but guess what? I still had a GBM to run at 9 p.m.. You’d think a two-hour break would mean rest, but instead I was cranking out homework and writing this article because if I didn’t, it would gnaw at me all night.
That’s the thing with college balance, it doesn’t exist in the same way it does in the workplace. At my co-op, you could hand me a mountain of tasks at 8 a.m. and I’d be fine. I had nine hours at my desk, headphones in, to chip away at them. If something rolled over into the next day, no big deal, as long as it was finished by the end of the week. But here? School slams me with things at 8 a.m. and I can’t even start them because I’m sprinting to class, then racing to a meeting, then off to another class, then to a GBM, then an e-board meeting — all before I find 30 minutes to send that email or add someone to a roster. My brain keeps a never-ending tally of it all — from the thermo assignment I haven’t touched to the text I still haven’t answered and it doesn’t shut up.
So when people say, “just find balance,” I laugh. The truth is that some days it works and some days it doesn’t, and the trick isn’t mastering a perfect system, it’s knowing your limits. Sometimes that means faking a deadline just to trick yourself into breathing room. Sometimes it means carving out 10 sacred minutes for coffee or nothingness. And sometimes it means crashing and saying, “this is too much,” and giving yourself permission to not be perfect.
The secret, if there is one, is that there is no secret. Balance in college is messy, unpredictable, and often nonexistent. But if you can let yourself stumble, pause, and get back up again, that might be the closest thing to balance we’ll ever get. And when you stumble, stumble hard. Let people pick you up. It doesn’t have to be graceful. The crash-outs are valid — don’t feel guilty. And for the love of everything, don’t compare yourself to other people. Different people work in different ways, and you never really know what goes on in someone’s life or in their head. At the end of the day, we’re all just figuring it out, day by day.
