Your teen years are some of the most important years of your life in terms of shaping your identity. They are the years where you find out who you are, when you start becoming your own person and when you consider what your future has to offer. That being said, the journey is not easy. There are many obstacles thrown at teens that bombard us with stress, headaches, mood swings and discomfort. Yet, many of these things are all vital for us to move forward to the next stages of our lives. Not only do we have to deal with assessments, essays and tests, but with the limited time we have, we also have to deal with our own personal lives and battling with romance, health and our social life. I, for one, think that the hardest thing to do is to find the balance between them all.
Prioritise
The first and most difficult step in this process is deciding what to prioritise. All of the individual components are important, but you need to decide which are more important than others. There are things which are necessities, such as finishing an assignment that is due, and there are things that are wants, such as going shopping with your friend at the weekend. It is up to you to categorise which component belongs in which category. A way to do this is to make a list of every single thing that you feel needs to be done, and then when it is all laid out in front of you, it is easier to manage and decide what you can do without.
Create a routine
Once this is done, the next step is to get into a routine. This can be easy if there are certain activities that you know you do every week, such as a team sport, but if not, you can still create the same type of schedule to accommodate different things. You may decide that you will have one day at the weekend reserved for relaxing and the other when you can focus on work you need to do. You may decide that it would work better for you to use specific times of the day to create your schedule, such as on Monday mornings and afternoons I study, and Monday evening I relax. It is a good idea to split your day into three (morning, afternoon and evening) and aim to keep one of the three time slots for relaxing, otherwise you will get too stressed and will become less productive.
Refresh with exercise
Another important thing to bear in mind is that you don’t want to be wasting any of your valuable time. If an assignment is taking too long to complete, take time away and focus on something else, maybe go to the gym or go get some lunch, and then come back to the task with a fresh perspective. Exercising, even for a short period of time, can be very rewarding for both your body and your mind. It provides relief from a stressful day of working and can allow you to completely remove yourself from the stressful environment, making it an excellent way to take a break from a task (and also slotting a workout session into a tight schedule). Remember that not every aspect needs to be balanced equally; it is all completely up to you. The important thing is that you’re happy and you feel as if you are managing everything well. If things start to become stressful again the process can always be replicated and reorganised. All teens suffer from a ‘lazy’ disease, but its finding the motivation to overcome this feeling of inevitability and forcing yourself to take control of your time that will make all the difference.
