Austin Scholar #30: Five Logical Reasons Why Mental Health Needs To Come First

& My Own Reminder Of Why Mental Health Is So Important

Hey, y'all!

No matter how much you think you know about mental health, and how good you think your habits are, it's an important thing to stay on top of.

Having good mental hygiene habits can make you wildly successful–and having poor mental hygiene habits can make you fall flat on your face.

Like I experienced this week. Oops?

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

This week from Austin Scholar...

1. Austin’s Anecdote: My own reminder of why mental health is so important

2. Five logical reasons why mental health needs to come first

3. Scholar’s Sources: My favorite videos on managing stress and staying productive

This week, my best friend P and I did a ton of feedback sessions with students from our Write of Passage: Liftoff focus group sessions, and they were so insanely cool. We got to hear what actual people thought about the exercises and sessions that we made?! Absolutely insane. 

From these sessions, we’ve gotten a ton of really great feedback about how we can improve Liftoff and take high school writing to the next level. Stay tuned for more updates on Liftoff–it’s going to be great.

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Austin’s Anecdote: My Own Reminder Of Why Mental Health Is So Important

I’m not going to lie: this week, I wasn’t on track to finish this newsletter on time.

This past Tuesday was quite possibly in the top ten most stressful days of my life. I had Liftoff meetings all day, a German lesson, a meeting with my academic coach (more on coaching in a future newsletter!), ridiculous amounts of app work to do, my final Alpha Bootcamp checklist items, and a ton of Twitter DMs and emails to respond to.

I was pretty overwhelmed. But I had to push forward.

All day, there was intense nervous energy coursing through my body. My hands couldn’t stop shaking. I felt like I  was in a constant “fight-or-flight” state, tensed in anticipation and dread.

A sensible person might realize that going about my day in this state was extraordinarily unhealthy, but I was so caught up in my task list that I just ignored these red flags.

At 11:30 PM (I hadn’t stopped since 9:00 AM), when I finally checked off the last thing on my checklist, I shut my computer and staggered to my bed, the adrenaline of the day wearing off.

Once I was laying in my bed with nothing to distract me from myself, I started to feel… pretty bad.

My stomach started unbearably hurting and I was sweating and my head was pounding. The shaking in my hands reached another level as my body tried to release the excess anxiety from the day.

I was horribly, physically sick.

The next morning, after a long and restless night, my mom came into my room to check on me, took one look at me, and told me to stay home.

Too delusional and tired to argue, I fell back to sleep.

In the afternoon, once I woke up again and could think coherently, I realized how incredibly stupid I had been.

I was so stressed that I made myself sick. I ignored all of the warnings my body had given me and just kept working. 

Not my brightest moment.

And because I was now sick, I had to stay home for the entire day and couldn’t do any school work at all. 

In my quest to do all of my work on Tuesday, I set myself up for failure for the rest of the week.

And so, after giving myself ten minutes to wallow in my self-pity, I grabbed by iPad and started watching Project Runway.

No work was getting done that day, so I took the time to reset and honor my body and my limits.

I’ve been really, really good about managing my stress levels and workload over the past year, but I’m still not perfect.

I’ve written about managing school stress and discussed my own mental health journey and how to help teenagers with their mental health, but even I need some serious reminders sometimes of why putting my mental health first is the most important decision in the entire world.

And, while it was unfortunate, this week reminded me of that. 

So, because of my little fiasco, I’m only getting started on this week’s newsletter–and it’s already Friday. Oops?

But it seems clear that mental health is an appropriate topic to revisit this week.

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Five Logical Reasons Why Mental Health Needs To Come First

My adventure this week isn’t an experience unique to me. Most high schoolers deal with these things, and it’s a problem. Because of that, I’ve compiled a list of five reasons why mental health needs to come before anything else in a high schooler’s life.