What Happens When You Spread Yourself Too Thin?
What does it mean to spread yourself too thin as a college student? Do you ever feel overwhelmed and like you’re doing various groups, activities, and hobbies that you can hardly handle it? That is the culture we live in now: striving and then striving some more. We, as college students, are constantly told we need to do more. We’re told to do more work, more activities, more organizations, more volunteer hours, more schoolwork, and more everything. When does it ever stop? The only way we can learn how to take care of ourselves is when we reach a breaking point and need to learn about why it’s a bad idea.
Why spreading yourself too thin is a bad idea
- You’ll get irritated easily
When you’re doing so many things that you can’t even think about what you’re currently doing and all you’re doing is think about what is next. Then what are you doing? When you’re doing so much you can hardly breathe, then you’re probably not sleeping enough which leads to being cranky.
2. You won’t have time for activities you actually enjoy
What are you actually passionate about? Are you doing it? Are you living into that? Do you enjoy sleeping? Then sleep. Do you enjoy reading? Do you have time to read? Read. Do you enjoy going to gym classes? Then do that. We have to have time for the things that we actually enjoy or else we will drag our feet for the rest of our lives.
Don’t lose the things that are important to you. Is time with certain friends important? Your family? Don’t lose those things because you’re too busy trying to please everyone else.
3. Stress overload and it will lead to break downs
Frequent stress does not have to be a facet of life — if you think not being able to sleep because you have too many things on your mind is normal, you’re really missing out on some quality z’s (that everyone else is totally getting).
Who wants to live in a constant state of anxiety? We don’t have to be living like that. We don’t need be under constant stress about what is going to happen next. Let’s simply breathe and know that everything is going to turn out fine in the end.
4. And you can’t always say no
When you spread yourself too thin then you are prone to keep spreading yourself thinner and lose the ability to say no to people and things going on. You’ll get asked, “Can you come do this too?” and respond, “Yes, of course, I can do anything!” Yes becomes a reflex answer and no’s becomes easier.
5. We form unhealthy habits
We form unhealthy habits where we don’t sleep enough, we don’t eat the way we should, and we don’t take care of our bodies. We are too busy to think about the things that are actually important to physically keep us healthy. That’s what happens when we spread ourselves too thin. We form habits that don’t nourish our bodies and then we become sick and lose the ability to keep up with ourselves.
Don’t let the unhealthy version of you be the only version of you.