Productivity & Stress

Recently, school has just started after the Chinese New Year holiday, and that marks the beginning of another semester. This means homework and school work is piling up again, and that goes alongside my extracurricular work. This means that not only do I have 8 hours of school, the time that I have to myself is limited to only 5 hours after school and maximum 0.5 hour before school. This is very little compared to having the whole day to myself during the holidays. I still feel like I need to have a longer holiday—more time for myself to get to know myself better and to get more things done that are done purely for myself. 

Sometimes, because of the amount of things I have to do, I have to stay up late to do them, which would mean 11:30 or 00:00 would be my new bedtime. A lot of what I do is because of the presence of anxiety, and most of it comes from seeing so many other people around me do so much and thinking that I am not doing enough to keep up with them. However, I do have my own plan, and I do my best to make my plan seem as straightforward as possible, without too much of the tasks that I just made up for myself because of anxiety. I tried to categorize them into School, Extracurriculars, Projects, etc, so that I can at least prioritize what to do. Sometimes, it works and I do follow what I told myself will do, but sometimes, because of the amount of things I have set for myself and such a limited time I have, I question the necessity of doing them and whether it is something that I will be willing to stay up late to work on. However, people will always tell me that I have time to find out, because of the fact that I am still in G9, but all I feel like right now is Riley from Inside Out—she knows that she wants to make the hockey team, but her journey of getting there is exactly like mine. I know what I want in the future, but my way of getting there is simply a bit long and I do sometimes feel lost on the way. But I know that trying out new things and getting to know more people will always be the answer to how I am going to achieve what I want to.

My mom would always tell me to go to bed early and tell me to sleep more but because of the amount of things I have figure out, I could not help myself but feel anxious and worried. But my anxiety is what drives me forward and gives me the motivation to go on. And this is what I hope to feel like in the future—motivated and satisfied.