By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed.
School can feel overwhelming for a million reasons, most of which have to do with the fact that school is hard. Iâm dead serious. AP physics can feel challenging because AP physics is challenging. Advanced economics can feel difficult because advanced economics is difficult.
But this post isnât about difficult classes. Itâs about 3 unexpected reasons school feels so overwhelming, even when the content itself isnât the problem.
Note: Iâve written a similar-ish blog post before, titled 7 Invisible Traps that Make School Feel Impossible. However, those seven reasons have to do with school itself. Itâs important to understand how those areas might also be at play, so read that post when youâre done here.
3 Unexpected Reasons School Feels So Overwhelming (That Have Nothing to Do with the Work Itself)
No matter how smart you are, school can feel so much harder than it really is if any of the following three areas affect you. So letâs break down these three unexpected reasons school feels so overwhelming â none of which are about how âhardâ your courses are, and all of which are fixable.
1. Emotional Dysregulation
No one likes hearing this, but school feels harder if you lack emotional regulation, take things personally, or blame teachers and environments for everything that goes wrong.
If you have ADHD, emotional dysregulation kind of just comes with the territory. But even people without ADHD can struggle to control their emotions during periods of high stress and discomfort.
What is emotional regulation? Emotional regulation is the ability to feel our feelings without letting them hijack our behaviors. Itâs fine if we feel angry, but staying regulated means we donât yell or lash out. Itâs fine if we feel resentful toward someone, but staying regulated means we donât act on that resentment.
If you lack emotional regulation, youâre also more likely to blame teachers for bad test grades and blame the content for being hard.
If you lack emotional regulation, youâre also more likely to take things personally. I often hear students say, âThe teacher just doesnât like me,â or âThe teacher was mad at me, so they gave me a bad grade.â
Let me tell you something: having been a teacher for 20 years, I can report that we donât get mad at students and we donât not like students. That would be weird. There are definitely kids who are more challenging, but on a human level, we donât have these kinds of feelings toward our students.
The problem with being emotionally dysregulated is that it prevents you from ever being able to make changes that improve your situation.
If you always think itâs the teacherâs fault for making a hard test, then youâll never be open to evaluating your study methods and finally using ones that work.
If you always think that itâs the contentâs fault for being hard, then youâll never learn strategies for doing hard things.
If youâre always blaming school for giving you so much work, then it will never occur to you that a few tweaks to your time management system could literally change your entire school experience and make everything easier.
The first strategy in emotional regulation is to recognize that youâre dysregulated in the moment.
This can be hard to do. When youâre in the middle of a panic episode about how unfair your teacher is, itâs hard to pause and say to yourself, âGee, I think Iâm emotionally regulated.â
But thatâs what you have to do. When youâre freaking out, take a pause. Step away from the situation. Take some breaths. Go for a walk. Put distance between yourself and the event that triggered you.
Next, ask yourself, What can I do in this situation?
Your inner voice might tell you, âNothing! Itâs all the teacherâs fault!â And this is normal at first. But return to the question: What can I do in this situation? If you donât ever ask yourself this question, youâll never find the answer. And the answer is how you become emotionally regulated and better at school.
2. Not Knowing How to Do School
Let me describe a completely absurd situation. Imagine you’re told to go on stage and play Mozart on the piano. Everyone is yelling at you, âJust play it! Why canât you play it? You have to play it!â
But letâs say in this scenario, you have never been taught how to play the piano. Youâre being told TO play, but never taught HOW.
Well then, good luck on stage!
Of course that scenario is absurd. But itâs the exact same thing that happens in school. Youâre told to study vocabulary but not taught how. Youâre told to study for Thursdayâs test, but never shown study strategies. Scolded to manage your time better⊠but that is literally the most abstract command ever. Like, what does that even mean?
Being expected to DO school without ever being taught HOW to do school is just as absurd as being told to play Mozart on the piano without ever being taught how to play the piano.
I canât even tell you how many students inside SchoolHabits University came into the program thinking school was so hard. Impossible, even. âIâm just bad at math,â or âIt takes me forever to read,â they would tell me. But after just a few weeks of learning how to learn, these students are shocked at how much easier their content becomes.
Said differently, itâs not the vocabulary word thatâs hard. Itâs just a word. But that word becomes nearly impossible if you donât know how to move that word from outside your brain to inside your brain in a way that you wonât forget it the next day.
So whatâs the solution? Learn how to do school.
This is exactly what I teach inside SchoolHabits University. Thatâs my online, self-paced course that teaches the strategies Iâve taught to thousands of students: Time management, task management, note-taking, annotating, study skills, and organization⊠and how they all work together to make school easier and your grades better. Learn more about the program here.
3. Mental Fatigue and Cognitive Overload
Everybody knows that stress and bad sleep impact performance. Thatâs why youâre told to get a good night’s sleep before a big game and youâre told to relax before a high-stakes performance.
But what people often ignore is the chronic cognitive overload that you feel as a student.
Constant distractions, poor sleep, and anxiety lead to a depleted brain, and a depleted brain perceives anything as harder, even simple tasks. (Scientifically, a stressed-out brain canât learn.)
The sneaky thing about mental fatigue is that it creeps up on you. You may be taking a semester of hard courses at the same time you signed up for a new club, at the same time you started a babysitting job on the weekends. Individually, those are all excellent activities. But collectively, they may be contributing to your sense that school is harder than it needs to be.
Everything we say yes to comes with invisible administration tasks that we donât think about. These are exhausting to us, even though we donât even think about them.Â
Factor together these invisible administration tasks, your sleep deprivation due to late-night studying and procrastination, stress about your grades, anxiety about your work schedule, and your general dread about not having enough time to do it all, and youâre looking at a perfect recipe for cognitive overload and collapse.
Doing more is not always better. Just because you can fit an activity in your calendar doesnât mean you have the time for it. If school feels harder than it should, and you have all of your âhow to do schoolâ systems dialed in (doubtful, unless youâre a student inside SchoolHabits University), it could be because youâre simply doing too much and are not aware of it.
Final Notes About Why School Feels Hard
Hereâs the thing that not a lot of people talk about: school is hard. Think about it: anytime you do something for the first time, it can feel hard. And practically every single day at school, youâre doing something for the first time. So yes, school is hard.
But getting a handle on your emotional regulation, your school and study skills, and your stress levels can make school feel 1000 times easier.
Students who refuse to change their approach to school are the ones who stay victims forever. Theyâre the ones who move through college and eventually careers, blaming professors and eventually bosses for things that they actually have complete control over. I want better for you.
Seriously consider the three areas I outlined in this post. And if any of these unexpected reasons school feels so overwhelming resonated with you, come join me inside SchoolHabits University, which gives you the fastest route to making everything about school easier.Â