It's safe to say that everyone had dealt with pressure at some point in their lives. If you're a CEO then you're familiar with the feeling; if you're a mom you know the feeling too. As we start the fall academic semester, it's important to acknowledge that our own mental state of health is equally if not more important than the grade we get back on our first essays.

Many of us are doing more than just focusing on school; we're working, going to internships, assisting our peers, freelancing, etc. It's especially challenging to balance these extracurriculars for the first time. Case in point, before this semester I have never done an internship and gone to class at the same time. I have worked on the weekends roughly a year ago, but I was able to handle it because there wouldn't always be shifts for us. Since I now have an internship three days a week, and class two days a week, having a busy lifestyle is not all it's cracked up to be. I have noticed a habit of idealizing or glamorizing things, ideas, or situations that I have never experienced before, only based off of hearsay or the media.

Time management has always been my main folly when it comes to productivity. I will say, however, that through disciplining myself a bit more, I was able to prioritize the things that needed prioritization. From doing so, I was able to get an internship and get the assignment I needed to get done earlier.

There is a negative side to this. I was disciplining myself by way of putting even more pressure on myself, rather, talking down to myself, to the point where my anxiety started to flare up. This is needless to say not a healthy way of pushing yourself, especially if you talk down to yourself enough already. I listen to myself now and can tell when I need to rest, work a little harder, slow down, or take breaks. This is the main message/lesson I would like to share with everyone. While it is important to push yourself, it's also important to do so in a healthy way.

It still baffles me how much time passes us. We're already half way through our first month back to school, the elections are coming up, and my baby niece is turning one in a couple of weeks. These events can also cause one to reflect on what one has done in the past year. Undoubtedly this also includes feeling the pressure of passing your classes, only to have to try and replicate the same thing the following semester. While I try and figure out how to alleviate the pressure I'm dealing with, I would like to encourage everyone to find their own method of blowing off some steam as well; I feel like it would do us all a lot of good.