Being a teen is sometimes just really rough.

Students juggle their home lives with school, sports and work. 

This tends to lead to stress and depression when a teenager gets overwhelmed and they can’t handle it anymore. 

Some students have depression and teachers or parents don’t realize that it’s very difficult being in that mental state. They call them lazy, but most of the time they have a hard time finding a will to get out of bed and have nothing to look forward to in life. This makes juggling everything so much harder.

CHS counselor, Mr. Dubois, said,  “Students’ biggest problem is time management which makes them feel overwhelmed.  There are so many activities, including school, sports, phones, social media, apps, jobs, video games, binge watching TV, etc that students can do that makes them feel overwhelmed.”

It’s fairly easy to walk the hallways and differentiate between students who are prepared and those who are not. The ones who seem more organized and have their life together do better in school. Although it’s hard to know what’s going on at home. 

Teenagers have a very hard time expressing their true feelings to teachers. They need to realize teachers are only trying to help them learn. That’s their whole job. 

Many students including myself have jobs and extracurriculars such as sports. Sometimes it is necessary for coaches to use tactics such as benching players when bad grades get in the way.

“As coaches we try to motivate our players to have at least Cs or higher.  If they do not, we have mandatory study tables before school once or twice a week that any player that has a low grades must attend,” Dubois says. 

Many kids focus more on their jobs rather than school, which isn’t great. It’s very hard to do many things at once. I personally prefer staying busy. The second I’m not. I feel lazy and crappy from not doing anything. It makes me feel unfit as a person. There are some students who choose lazy lifestyles and belittle their potential by not trying their best. 

Dubois also mentions, “Students need to really find out what is important to them.  Whatever that is, they need to manage their time around that.  If students would take a day to write down how much time they spend doing certain things throughout the day, they would be amazed.”

So as students, if we use our time wisely and set short term goals, we can live a successful high school experience. This helps with depression, anxiety and just overall well being.