We say it’s not worth it, but nobody ever elaborates on it. Colleges don’t see your mental disarray, they see your GPA first. So WHY is this trade off not worth it if you’re gonna say it isn’t?
There are a lot of pathways to a successful and happy life. Being so stressed out that you are suicidal at a young age is not one of them. Far better to take a slower road. There are many happy people in the world who didn’t graduate from a top-20 college. There are many happy people in the world who didn’t even go to college. It’s a fine line as a parent… you want your kid to do their best and challenge themselves, but keep a healthy perspective of what really matters. As a student, if you find yourself being pushed too hard, think about what your other options might be. (Community college? Trade school? Military? Working at Starbucks for a few years while you take a few classes and figure out what you really are interested in doing?)
Because it SUCKS. You can’t enjoy your grades because you perpetually live in fear of messing them up. You consider any time you don’t perform perfectly a total failure, which means you consider yourself a failure, creating a loop that makes it harder and harder to motivate yourself. You can’t relax because any time you’re not working schoolwork feels like time wasted. You might develop legitimate, diagnosable mental illnesses like anxiety and depression, which make it a struggle to find joy in any aspect of life, or even create suicidal tendencies. (And grades are completely and totally irrelevant if you’re dead, so that alone should be the only reason you need to prioritize health over grades.)
And for what? There are thousands of universities in the United States – you can definitely get into college without hurting yourself to do it. If you develop these negative habits in high school, they will not go away in college, which just means that you won’t be able to enjoy the experience you’ve worked so hard to have.
Because if your mental health suffers too much you become less motivated and eventually end up with both bad grades and poor mental health.
Speaking as someone who recently let a job severely impact my mental health, I can say in my opinion at NO time in your life is it worth pushing yourself so hard - in high school, college, work, volunteer, home - anywhere - that you negatively impact your mental health over a long term. Certainly there will always be short term stress, but driving yourself so hard that you can’t take any joy in life is harmful in so many ways.
Working hard in high school is great. Driving yourself to extreme mental stress sets you up to follow the same pattern in college and after - which negatively impacts mental AND physical health.
Students who drive themselves to a point of mental health issues in high school often have complete breakdowns at some point in their college careers because that level of stress is not sustainable long-term. Driving yourself so hard you eventually crash and burn is not achieving success.
In addition to breakdowns, suicide is the third leading cause of death among young adults.
Trying to get perfect grades in the toughest courses is not possible for everyone, or even for most kids. There is room in higher education for kids who got less than perfect grades or who lightened their schedule the right level for them.
Because people DO commit suicide. My 20-year-old nephew did. If he had let people know he was stressed or ill, he could have gotten the help he needed. Instead, he acted as if everything was fine - he was scheduled to fly to Europe the week after he died, to study economics for a semester. I don’t want that nightmare to happen for ANY other family. You think you might know how a family would feel in those circumstances, but trust me, you don’t.
I went to a well known STEM magnet high school where you must maintain a 3.0 to stay, and basically all courses were honors, AP, and post-AP. My junior year, they started depression screenings for the juniors because people were working so hard to stay afloat (maintain As and Bs) that they were developing mental health issues. Junior year is actually known as death year there, and a significant number of students switch out of the school that year to preserve their mental health. I didn’t and I ended up with pretty severe depression- I pretty much stopped going to my dance classes and doing things I enjoyed. There was actually a solid two years (spring semester sophomore year through first semester senior year) where I often would cry myself to sleep, if I even got the chance to sleep and wasn’t working all night. It was extremely unhealthy, especially with someone with pre-existing diagnosed OCD, ADHD, and anxiety disorders. It sucked- and I still got mainly Bs. I really couldn’t have lightened up unless I left the school cuz I was taking easier classes than most of my class mates (I only took 4 APs), and that just made me feel worse. Looking back, I wish I wouldn’t have pushed myself as hard as I did because mental health issues stay with you. I have taken a much more relaxed approach to my grades in college (my scholarship did depend on maintaining a 3.0, but I found that to be less stressful in college), and my life is much more enjoyable.
First of all what do you mean by “sacrificing mental health”? There is a huge difference between the occasional feeling stressed out during midterms/finals and having debilitating depression/feeling suicidal. IMO the occasional stressed out feeling is part of adult life, but any major issues really must be dealt with immediately.
Mental health is way more important than grades. It impacts every aspect of a person’s life.
Even in your very limited analysis – if your mental health is suffering your grades will eventually suffer as well. A person can’t do his/her best work over a long time period if he/she is in a bad mental state.
In high school/college, you will naturally have to sacrifice some things on occasion, such as sleep or time with friends for the sake of school; things such as sleep and time with loved ones are important to mental health.
There is, however, a very obvious difference between pulling some all-nighters or having to devote a lot of time to studying for exams and becoming so obsessed with grades to where you start posting dozens of threads on the internet asking pointed questions to strangers that insinuate that your future is worthless if you earn a C in a class or that you are willing to sacrifice a significant portion of your own well-being for the sake of high school performance.
I’m not trying to attack you. I’m saying that you really need to change your perspective of high school and life in general because this is not healthy behavior. Also, if you want to do better in your classes, then this isn’t the place that’s going to help you do that; asking questions online can only help so much, and the only way to better your academic situation (if it’s even that bad) is through working with your teachers in class.
If you’re so depressed you can’t get out of bed in the morning, your GPA is not going to be good for long. Nor will your job prospects even if you graduate.
I teach at a college. I emphasize repeatedly to my students that there is nothing more important to me than their mental and physical health and wellbeing. And I mean it- and my students know I mean it based on their openness to me and their anonymous student reviews.
I am speaking from the place of someone who has battled mental health problems in high school, undergrad, and now in a phd program: when your mental health is poor, nothing else functions correctly. Those with mental health problems can’t usually just “power through” everything. My depression gets so bad that I can’t get out of bed for days or weeks. It’s better now, with treatment, but before that? In middle school, I missed nearly 2 months of school because of depression.
Truly, if your mental and physical health aren’t good, your GPA is irrelevant. Everything is irrelevant if you’re dead.
My son has had a hellish semester, dealing with depression. We’ve encouraged him to take a couple of incompletes, which he will do. No one ever has “She had a perfect GPA” on their tombstone.
I feel like in high school and college it’s so easy to be obsessed with the future - undergrad, grad school, job prospects - that GPA turns into the main component of one’s identity. Over summer breaks (and breaks from college confidential) I completely forget about my GPA and transcript altogether, and it feels like I’m no longer defined by just a number. I guess I’ve come to the conclusion that if I’m so obsessed about the future and unhappy about the present, am I even going to be happy in the future? And isn’t happiness the ultimate goal of life?
@Massmomm I am sorry your son is having a hard time. My son had issues end of freshman year with depression and bad grades. His grades dropped and got a F in one class and was on the brink of failing another class. We were beside ourselves. We had him evaluated over that summer and he was diagnosed with ADHD also. After that horrible year my son was having we totally changed our view on college and grades.
I knew that if he went back for sophomore year we would have to change our view. I tried not to harp on grades and waited for him to tell me how things were going with classes. I always encouraged him to do the best he can possibly do. Now we are coming to end of Junior year and I am on pins and needles with his grades. His GPA is a 2.67. His mental health is much more important then his GPA. I keep telling him just do the best and one year to go. So I totally agree with you. No one will care what his GPA will be after he gets his first job. Good luck to your son. I hope he gets the help he needs.
Young people need to learn good mental hygiene just like other types of hygiene to try to prevent mental health disorders. Mental hygiene involves having a good balance in life, healthy perspectives, and skills for coping when things get stressful, tragedies happen, etc.
The problem with mental health disorders is that they often go untreated. There is still stigma involved. Sometimes when someone sick does reach out for help, they don’t get taken seriously, especially when they are high functioning usually. It is a situation to try to prevent if at all possible. Grades are one of the many pressures that make certain people vulnerable.
As someone currently going through this tradeoff, I’ll tell you why.
You can’t enjoy your high grades if you are constantly depressed or convinced that you are a terrible person that won’t amount to anything. You might tell me “Oh, look at your high grades, that’s proof you aren’t, now stop being depressed.” First off, a depressed person always finds something to feel terrible about. Second of all, you can’t just STOP being depressed.
I’ll admit I’m probably set to be admitted to at least a half-decent school (see my chance me thread), but even today I catch myself thinking seriously negative thoughts about myself and harboring incredibly pessimistic thoughts about my future and my ability to succeed. I keep thinking I am worse than everyone else, that I am worthless. As you might tell, high grades don’t do anything to alleviate mental health decline. On top of this, I suffer from physical health complications and the mother of all sleep deprivation as part of the consequences of my terrible mental health.
I understand this may be difficult for someone who grows up in a household and whose parents might place serious weight on performance in school to understand, but grades sure as heck do not mean everything.
You don’t need high grades to enjoy life. My parents have a friend who is working a minimum wage job, didn’t even go to college, and he is having the time of his life since his job is simple, and he can still do whatever he wants to do. On the flip side, you have my uncle, who is working a high paying and earning six figures, but had to suffer from serious psychological and mental health trauma in his undergraduate and graduate years trying to get his grades as high as possible. Even today, we worry for him because sometimes he says things that just put us on high alert.
There are seriously far reaching implications of mental health decline. It can affect you for much longer than you think or in a way that you never thought it could. A bunch of letters on a piece of paper means nothing compared to your own well-being.
It’s really very simple.
Without your health, you have nothing.
All those other threads about APs and top colleges and all the rest… even if you do manage to accomplish all those things, you can’t enjoy the fruits of your labor without good mental health.
@AsadFarooqui , you have posted a few threads now that lead me to believe that you are feeling concerned about your own mental health and starting college. You’ve had sound advice here, but I strongly suggest you meet with a therapist before you start college. No one here is a mental health professional. If you are feeling uncertain now, do something about it before it becomes a problem.
Someone in my family experienced depression. He was lucky, because by the time he was feeling really bad, he realized what was wrong and did something about it. It took a lot of willpower, and being very proactive about his mental health, as well as therapy and medication. The problem with depression is, often, that people get to the point where it’s really bad before they do something about it. And often, they feel unable to do anything about it, and it can lead to very bad outcomes. He has said that before that point, he wasn’t happy, and hadn’t been for a while, but just kept plodding on, not realizing that it was going to get worse before it got better. He now says he wishes he had sought help much earlier.
Mental health is nothing to treat casually. No one wants to experience that black hole and feeling of despair that is depression, and anxiety too, which eats away at your soul. This is why colleges offer free counseling on campus. It tends to get very booked up. I advise you to book an appointment with a counselor at your college as soon as you arrive on campus, even if just to check that you are doing ok.
^^^^ BEST ADVICE EVER GIVEN ON THIS SITE. Please follow @Lindagaf 's advice.