Making the Most Out of High School

High school studies and high school life is very crucial for every person. As a high school student you are an adolescent which means you are in between being young and being matured. Because you are in this age bracket, you will have mixed characteristics which means you are torn between being carefree and being responsible. However, you can make the most out of this two worlds to make the most out of high school.

· Be Carefree – Even though you are trained towards being a grown up and matured person, you are in fact still young. You should not repress youthful feelings and your young characteristics. You should be carefree at enough extent. It is even necessary as a foundation for building a mature character. Practicing a healthy amount of being carefree will prepare you for being responsible. If you have experienced being happy go lucky, you will find out that you have experienced this as a stage which you needed to go through so that you will be able to move on to the next stage of being responsible. If you will not experience a certain degree of being carefree at this stage of your life and jump immediately towards maturity, you will experience a very bad kind of midlife crisis later on.

· Be Responsible – If you have the right amount of being carefree, you can inject the corresponding amount of being responsible. As a young person, being responsible will give you a very good kind of motivation and perseverance. You will be able to learn how to be contented and happy with what you have and make the most out of them. For example, you can still join your better off classmates in playing basketball even if they are wearing the best rubber shoes and you just settle wearing the affordable ones. If you are carefree enough and responsible enough too, you will not mind wearing an inferior kind of equipment because you know that it is not what is important. This is only an example and there are lots of bigger things you can apply being responsible to. Applying this to your studies should be the best. If you are contented with the kind of clothes and school supplies you have, you can excel in your studies.

Coping and Dealing With High School Stress

Whatever year level you are in high school, you could be sure that you would experience high school stress at one point or another. From being a freshman until now that I am a sophomore student, I visited our school counselor several times for advice on coping with the stress and pressures in getting passing grades in my assignments, projects,  examinations and other academic tasks, dealing with my classmates and teachers, and all other things occurring at school that contributes to the stress that I feel.

It's a good thing that after several discussions with our school counselor, my close friends at school, my parents, and reading various materials in the library and the Internet, I have been able to cope and overcome the stress of being a high school student. So now I am sharing with everyone the things I learned on how a high school student could cope with stress in high school based on my conversations I had with our school counselor and from the various materials I read in the library and from the Internet.

The general tips on how to cope with high school stress:

· Don't be overwhelmed with the academic workload. The academic load and other tasks in high school could be full of pressures especially for freshmen students. I felt the same way when I was a freshman student. So I learned two important tips for this problem – time management and a healthy lifestyle.

· The time management involves keeping a routine or schedule of the things you have to do everyday for the whole week. I started with a written schedule that I could adjust every weekend so it would fit according to the tasks that I would do each day for the whole week since you would usually not do the same task every day.

· A healthy high school lifestyle is getting enough sleep, eating moderately, and having an exercise routine. I learned that seven to eight hours of sleep is essential, eating more fruits and vegetables and less junk food is preferable, and a regular exercise routine of 30 minutes a day for at least three times a week is ideal.