Back To School: Does It Affect Us Even In Adulthood?
Summer is usually a time of vacations, trips, few obligations… but, like everything, it ends at some point.
It’s great that we enjoy the vacation season and the freedom of plans that the good summer weather allows us, but We also do not have to demonize the return to routine. When we return to work, it is clear that we come into contact with emotions that are not pleasant to us.
To begin with, we begin to anticipate what it will be like to return to work, that we will have to get up early again, stick to a schedule, do things that we don’t feel like… and all of this makes laziness appear, that feeling that the next day will be too much for us. up hill.
Furthermore, when we have a lot of work piled up before we return from vacation, we may feel some anxiety and have the feeling that we will not be able to tackle everything that comes our way.
Despite all the leisure and enjoyment of summer and vacations, There are many people who report that at the end of summer they already miss returning to their routine a little. to order, to their habits and to the stability of day-to-day life.
Do you remember when you were a child and, despite feeling a little lazy, you were also excited about going back to school? It was time to meet friends again, to release new books, to discover who would be your new teacher… Below, you will find some proposals to make your “back to school” a little more exciting.
Returning to the routine after the holidays: anticipation vs. reality
Laziness and anxiety are very common when returning to school, but… **Do you know that they are often more present in the days before returning to work than the day we return? **
The mind tends to anticipate everything that is going to happen and, furthermore, to think that it is going to be something horrible. It prepares us to put ourselves in the worst of situations… The mind is a pessimist!
This way of evaluating the future has a lot to do with our evolution as a species. Preparing for the worst has allowed us to protect ourselves from many dangers throughout our history as human beings. Now we are no longer in contact with all those dangers, but we continue to fear a bad response from a colleague, a work task for which we feel incapable, or a fight from a boss.
Remember that most likely your mind is anticipating that the day you return to your routine is going to be worse than it actually will be. Once you’re at work, take action and your day will fly by.
Love and hate routine
The word “routine” can have some negative connotations in our culture. However, when we are missing it out of obligation, that is, when our daily life has no structure, we can come to miss it.
It is necessary to get out of that daily routine, of obligations and dedicate ourselves to resting and enjoying during the holidays; but it is also true that we are able to enjoy rest because it is done for a limited period of time and, therefore, it is experienced as something exceptional that must be squeezed to the maximum.
After a while, everything returns to its order and everyone to their place. Getting back to routine doesn’t have to be negative. Our return to school can be a good opportunity to resume our daily habits or include those that we have been proposing for some time.
During the holidays we tend to neglect our diet, we stop doing sports, we do not structure our sleeping hours… When the summer period ends, it is time to return or start doing what feels good to us. which helps us maintain good health and provides structure to our week.
At the beginning of September we may experience a slight drop in mood and some anxiety. After all, we have left that oasis called “vacation” in which there are not many obligations, we have a lot of free time and all the activities are made to enjoy.
This is normal and it is not advisable to give it a name as pathologizing as “post-vacation depression.” It is not clinical depression, far from it. It is simply a normal reaction to a change in our daily situation.
Plan your own back to school
It is normal for us to have a hard time getting started the first few days, for us to feel exhausted and to miss being on vacation. Sometimes this depression can bring us unpleasant emotions and a feeling of not having the energy to face the activities of our routine. What can we do to alleviate the effect this has on us?
1. Start at the beginning
You arrive at work, open your email and find your tray full. Furthermore, you have ten calls from colleagues and superiors asking you to resolve something and you still haven’t even opened the week’s agenda… Does that sound familiar to you?
It is normal that after a few weeks of absence from our job, a lot of work accumulates and a mountain becomes so big that we don’t even know where to start. Tackling what is most urgent first can help you organize your workload. Furthermore, twenty tasks cannot be solved if we do not start with one of them. So take the first one, and go with it.
2. Only your action will get you out of the loop
When we find ourselves faced with a large volume of work at once, we may have the feeling that we won’t be able to handle it.
Thinking and planning how we will solve everything can help, but we must be careful not to just visualize how we will do things. Situations are only resolved through action.
3. Don’t forget that free time still exists
Yes, it’s the end of summer, but you still have your days and your hours of rest from work. Don’t forget that you must continue taking care of this free time, doing things that have meaning for you and bring you well-being.
When autumn arrives, we not only find ourselves with work commitments. We also want to meet up with people we haven’t seen all summer, run some errands we left pending, etc.
It seems that suddenly the agenda is saturated! Don’t forget about yourself, take care of yourself and dedicate some time to yourself. Fall is a great time for self-care.
You may be interested: “23 hobbies to do at home and have fun”
5. Take some of your summer habits with you
During the holidays we change our habits. Some take the opportunity to read more, to dedicate more time to their favorite sport or to spend more time with family.
It is true that with the return to routine we cannot maintain all the activities we do in summer, but I’m sure that in some way you can take a little piece of that into your daily life, adapting it to your context, your schedule and your circumstances.
The context is changing… so are we!
Back to school this year has some very important peculiarities. Many jobs are returning to face-to-face work, the epidemiological situation is improving and it seems that it is not only a return to normality, it seems that we are getting closer to the old normality.
Although this is good news at first glance, For some people it can be distressing or stressful and their usual behaviors are no longer adjusting to this changing context. We are adapting to a new reality, and it is normal for some discomfort to appear.
If you see that your return to school is being too hard for you, and that after a few weeks you are not able to adapt to all these changes, we invite you to review in which direction you are moving, what things are helping you and what are not, and what You can change to improve your routine. Surely one of our psychologists can help you!
