You’ve just studied for hours and hours to get a decent grade on a midterm exam. Finally, exam day comes along. Let’s say that you feel good about the exam and all the effort that you put into it created a good outcome. Or maybe this is a situation where you might have felt horribly about the test despite sacrificing your mental health and all your free time to make a valiant effort. There’s also the third scenario that I like to call the in-between, where you have absolutely no clue how you performed in either direction. Whichever reaction you had to the exam, at least it’s over and you can finally take a breather. But you can’t really, can you? There’s a paper due next week and a group project due in three days, and your club meeting is tomorrow night, and there’s that party you have to energize yourself for despite wanting to rest — the list goes on and on.
College is all about trying to transform yourself into a machine that performs endless academic and social tasks without taking a break unless you physically can’t go on any longer. If we’re all aspiring to perform well and have a little fun along the way, there’s almost always enormous amounts of pressure to push on despite our body’s warnings. Have you ever walked into a lecture and looked across the room to see exhausted faces, half-open eyes and students staring off into space? Yeah, that’s every single lecture I’ve been to at Binghamton University. Chris Lamb of the Chicago Tribune calls it a “thousand-yard stare.” It is one of the direct results of the stress and anxiety that we put ourselves through. Everyone knows that many college students struggle with mental health issues, so I won’t just complain about college administrations being ignorant to cries for help from their student populations. Instead, I want to talk about one potential solution to our predicament. It’s about learning how to do nothing.
First off, learning how to do nothing is actually a really difficult feat to accomplish. The entire American economy and our capitalist system is designed to instill the values of highest output or production possible. This non-stop working mentality is arguably unique, at least in the way that it is applied, compared to many different countries around the world. For example, the United States is the only industrialized country in the world without a mandatory option for parental leave with benefits. Workers are often overworked and underpaid. Even if you make it big in the corporate sphere and make six figures or more, our legal framework and mentality from education is to keep working harder, sacrificing more and more until our lives become defined by what we do when we clock in. This is extremely dangerous and obviously leads to declining mental health among workers who do pivotal jobs in the likes of medicine or engineering. Small breaks and unpaid vacation days won’t fix our problems — bigger steps must be taken.
Your professors and advisors will likely say that you must put in the maximum effort in order to achieve the best results possible if you are hoping to contribute to the economy and therefore make a life for yourself. If we value production from labor so highly and if our colleges and universities are supposed to prepare students for the workforce in one way or another with a degree, then of course we are meant to live up to the values in the workforce as students. But what if there was a way that college students could learn how to actually do nothing in a way that is beneficial? And no, going on your phone or computer is not doing nothing, scrolling through social media for hours is not doing nothing and watching TV for hours is also not doing nothing. What if we could create a class from scratch that instilled the values of doing nothing into students? But we don’t have to, since there’s already a model.
At Lawrence University in Wisconsin, Professor Constance Kassor has already devised an appropriate model for teaching students how to escape the cycle of stress, at least briefly. Strangely enough, this one-credit class happens to be the most popular of every class offered at the University. It is a one-hour course taught by a different faculty member or invited member each week, who teach a different value of relaxation and de-stressing at each session. For Kassor’s course, this ranges from anything like a lecture about the psychology of sleeping to a mandatory walk through nature without a phone or option to converse with anyone. The overall goal is to teach students not to be powered-on 24/7, always focusing on completing the next task that lies ahead.
Basically, we should expand what we define as successful from a definition about production to a definition about overall well-being, happiness and satisfaction. Even if you believe it’s important that college students are treated like non-human beings in order to produce great workers for the future, surely you would support an initiative that gives us a chance to also be happy. To be fair, BU does have ways for students to reach out, like the University Counseling Center or the Mental Health Outreach Peer Educators (M-HOPE) group. It’s always important that all students who are feeling depressed reach out to some of these dedicated professionals that the University provides. But it would also be nice if BU made more of an initial effort to reach out to us, especially through classes.
We shouldn’t be treating the issue of college students’ unhappiness as a small bruise. A temporary fix under the status quo just won’t do it anymore. Colleges need to invest much more in the mental health of their students in a number of ways, and teaching them how to take a break in a successful manner will do an enormous amount of good. It’s not enough for professors who are supposed to assign those 9.5 hours worth of work outside of class each week to have a little sympathy in their hearts — the process of helping students must become more active. The best way to be active is to teach us how to do nothing.
Sean Reichbach is a sophomore double-majoring in economics and philosophy, politics and law.