I feel as though my performance in school is dropping and I don’t know how to fix it.

What feelings arise? 

I feel stressed but incapable and wary because I don’t know how to fix it. If I let myself sit with my feelings of not succeeding, I still feel the need to fix it. To go back towards my success at the beginning of the year. I feel stranded because I don’t know how to handle my situation. I feel guilt doing personal things because I know if I dedicated more time to school I could get better. My guilt tells me I already know that there’s more I can be doing that I’ve just not done.

Whenever I do anything non-school related I feel guilty.

How does it affect you?

The stress from not performing as well makes me feel like a failure so I’m not motivated to continue with studying hard. I know my grades and sleep schedule is suffering. I am not used to failing. I’ve been a high achieving student my entire life so feeling my grades drop makes me feel worthless. I know me not succeeding is no one’s fault but my own. My mom is a therapist so I know how to analyze my feelings and take responsibility for them. To me, the ultimate achievement is to attend Columbia. I do everything I do in the hopes that I will somehow make it into the top tier school. Every misstep I make is something that counts against me getting into Columbia. To not get in is the ultimate failure to me.

What is your part?

My actions led to this and I recognize this is my own lack of motivation combined with too many outside activities.

What are you learning?

I’m learning that I need to find a way to motivate myself again. I also need to rededicate my time.

When I see my grades now in comparison to other points in my life, I get upset and feel dissatisfied. If I score poorly on something I assumed I would do well on, it stresses me out even more. I reassure myself with good performance in other areas of my life. When I feel extra stressed, I’m not productive with, I just spiral. I use social apps to cope.

I realized that I feel inadequate with my free time.

Meditation makes me anxious because I feel like I’m wasting time.

I can’t blame others for my thoughts.

Grades/performance dictate my view of myself. 

What can you shift or turn around in your thinking or feeling? 

I can shift my time commitments and reassess my study and work habits. I can also shift my mindset from “I am struggling” to “I can.” 

How do you choose to work with your difficulty?

I have already quit on extracurricular I wasn’t dedicated to and I can reorder the importance of the ones I’m currently in to maintain a positive outlook. Quitting my extracurricular has been amazing however I’m tempted to join more to fill up that space. My free time feels like wasted time. 

What is the difficulty teaching you? 

Reordering my study and work habits and extracurricular will likely make my life feel less busy but also significantly less stressful.

16 years, female