(Courtesy of PickPik)
In most, if not all, of my lectures, a chorus of cans opening can be heard within the first few minutes of the lecture starting. As a wave of caffeine hits the class, I begin to wonder if the Red Bull sitting in front of me is a good idea, but I drink it anyway because I didn’t sleep last night, and it’s not that bad if everyone else is drinking some type of caffeinated drink too, right? When I met up with my friend later that day, he mentioned how hungry he was because it was 7 p.m. and all he had consumed was a granola bar from the vending machine and a snack from an event that was somewhere on campus. We both laughed it off, and I jokingly scolded him for this.
But as I navigate my way through campus and talk to other people, I’ve been noticing a pattern. People often use their bad habits, like a caffeine addiction or a lack of proper nutrition, to be funny and try to relate to other people. When people mention things that may be of concern, we all just add to the fire by showing off our bad habits as a quirky aspect of ourselves. Just like some people ride unicycles to class or wear a pirate hat every day, we lack sleep and procrastinate our work!
On a serious note, though, where did this behavior come from? How did we collectively get to this point of not just accepting these habits but also joking about them and turning them into something relatable?
“I’m way more accountable to others than myself, so maybe telling others and saying it out loud is a way of trying to hold myself accountable… I don’t want to feel like I’m the only one struggling to hold a balance,” Kate Semsar, Assistant Director of STEM Education at the University of Colorado Boulder said.
One of the biggest reasons that I can think of as to why we play off these bad habits, is that college is hard. As people transition to adulthood and find their place in the world, they struggle. It is hard to balance a job, school, social life and taking care of yourself. So we cut out that last bit to make more time. Suddenly, when you have a paper due, going to bed doesn’t seem so important. Our priorities get shifted. I don’t think anyone wants to skip dinner or not sleep until three in the morning only to get up at 8 a.m. It’s just an unfortunate side effect of being busy. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take care of ourselves. That’s how we burn out.
The term “burnout” has been going around for a while. It’s when you exhaust yourself and your brain until it’s at its breaking point. You no longer function like a human and you just do what you can to get through the day. It’s difficult to determine when we are hitting a point of burnout, so we ignore that little voice telling us to eat a meal because we have an exam, so it’s time to lock in. But when we hit our breaking point, we lose the motivation to do the work in the first place. People tend to work because they have to and use up their resources doing that work. Instead of working through dinner, take a break, and keep your head in a good mental space. Because burnout is very real, it is harmful and could lead to further mental health problems.
We hear it daily, but social media contributes to this conversation more than we may think. Social media is a place where people are trying to seem like they are relatable to a huge group of people. Every day, bad habits are taken and multiplied to an extreme. We also see people who make “What I Eat in a Day” videos, in which they just drink coffee for breakfast, skip lunch and have a snack for dinner and call it a day. People then see this and can have to urge to copy what everyone else is doing because influencers can affect other people’s lives in a big way.
“I think bad habits become [more] common because of social media, because it’s more relatable to talk about bad habits,” Shannon Evans, a first-year student at CU Boulder, said.
Recently, Kay Chung, a dental student at the University of California Los Angeles, went viral on TikTok for her all-nighters, where she drinks multiple energy drinks and coffees to study and cram for her dental exams. Seemingly, she started a trend, and other influencers have been filming themselves doing the same. This has been deemed “The Kay Chung Study Method” on TikTok. This overconsumption of caffeine has been glamorized and made to seem like something that we should be striving for.
All in all, people are not living their best life when they show up to their third lecture of the day on an empty stomach and no sleep, but we make it seem like it’s normal. Normalizing these aspects of our lives is very harmful and leads to people continuing their bad habits and sometimes even worsening them. Not everyone has to be perfect; nobody is, but it is a bad idea to go in the completely opposite direction too. Just take care of yourself and encourage others to do the same. College is a hard time; we don’t have to make it worse.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Frida Montes at Frida.Montes@colorado.edu.
