Young people

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Eeep! When study is overwhelming! - Tips, ideas and coping strategies

replies: 51

Hi! Just thought I’d make a post with some tips for study. I know this is something we can all struggle with. These are all suggestions so feel free to take them or leave them! Hope they help! If you only remember one thing, let it be this: You are important. Your grades don’t define you. (support) Studying can feel isolating but know you’re not alone! Reach out – and find or make friends that can support you along the way. If you’re having trouble finding some friends, join some local communities or clubs! They have lots at Uni’s and even stuff like open days are great ways to meet new people and find out what’s happening. Study groups can also be a great way to meet people and stay motivated. Also remind yourself why you’re doing this; inspirational wallpapers or quotes can be super inspiring. Remember the saying about the oxygen mask? If you can’t take care of yourself first studying will be harder. You are important. You know the drill - water, food, exercise, sleep. Try to stay calm. Stuff that might be able to help include mindfulness, breathing exercises, colouring in, going for walks, journaling, listening to music… If you’re struggling – reach out. See a therapist. Talk to your student counsellor. If you need help, don’t be afraid to ask for it. Also lots of Universities and TAFE offer disability services – which includes conditions like Depression and Anxiety. (study) Find the right study space for you. Maybe that’s in your room, or a coffee shop, or the library. Some people find that noise helps; other people not so much. If you like particular kinds of noise, you can find ‘coffee shop’ noise or ‘rain sounds’ to help concentrate. Make a plan. It helps to do it often so it becomes a habit. Anytime you get a due date, write it down. Maybe you could use a diary, planner, bullet journal or an app. I find the 30/30 App helpful - study for a bit and then break for a bit. You can also get add-on’s for your computer to block sites like Facebook if you find them too distracting. Find out what study technique works for you. Do you like cue cards? Mind maps? Colour coding? Does highlighting stuff help you remember? Charts, maps, diagrams? Recorded lectures? Goals! These are so important – not just writing down deadlines but rewarding yourself for meeting them. Even making smaller goals like ‘read two pages from a textbook’ can help. Break it down into bite size pieces, and don’t forget to reward yourself after!

NEW TO THIS FORUM? Please read this first

replies: 0

The Young People space is a sub-forum within the wider Beyond Blue forum community. 1. Its purpose is to provide members aged 25 and under a space to discuss anxiety, depression and other related life issues. If you are aged over 25, please be mindful that this forum is a space for younger people to connect and provide peer support for each other. 2. Content from this sub-forum is displayed on both the beyondblue and youthbeyondblue websites. 3. Please bear in mind that some members find content relating to suicide and/or self-harm distressing or triggering. If you would like to post on these topics, please do so in our Suicidal Thoughts and Self Harm section. Please see also our guidelines for making posts on this topic. Posts made here in the Young People sub-forum containing content relating to suicide and/or self-harm will be moved. 4. These forums are moderated, so your posts may not appear straightaway. Information on how our system works can be found here. Being familiar with our community rules can help ensure that your posts appear online as quickly as possible. 5. This is a peer support community, and to get the best out of being here we recommend that you 'give support to receive support'. More on how that works here.

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Understanding your emotions - why they’re happening

replies: 2

Do you wonder why you suddenly feel awful and you have no control over it? Have you felt fine, but then feel trapped in negativity wondering when it will end? I’ve felt this too. It’s rare for me to feel down anymore but only because I’ve paid attention to it, and worked on areas that were possible for me to change. Remember that you have reason to feel the way you do. It may be biological, or it could be other various things that changed your view on the world. Your mind in tangible. You have ability to change the way you think. If you decide to contact me, I’ll give you some answers. Hope you’re well. -Chris

Finding someone to help me.

replies: 1

Hi there, I'm just wondering if anyone knows what I could do to find someone that could help me in my situation. I've had gaps in time in my study due to bad mental health and I want to find people who could do an diagnostic assessment of past uni content. However, because I've studied an interdisciplinary area... it's not like I can find one person and a lot of tutors are uni students who only tutor in 1 thing or so and wouldn't know about diagnostic assessment. Also, I keep getting distressed. Do you know if there's any occupation that has dealings with distressed people and that could assist me in this manner re finding applicable people? Because I cannot get help from my mother because, for example, she gets distressed and talks for a long time about mental health stuff. Also my psychologist is dismissive of me. Also, I did contact the Uni Faculty about my concerns and basically I got told "do your best in your courses" like I haven't done so in the past... Like because I've done some stuff a while ago and because probably never experienced depression... I felt like they didn't understand one bit. And I have memories of struggling to do stuff re hopelessness, meaningless and concentration issues so my self esteem isn't high.

painful nostalgia feeling?

replies: 3

i feel as if whenever i get nostalgic about something, i end up feeling quite anxious and upset? one example of this is last year i got invited (out of courtesy) to a former best friend's birthday party. the two of us were best friends for a few years but drifted due to now going to separate schools and not seeing each other all the time. her friends from her school made her a video from all of them wishing her a happy birthday and she seemed to be having a really good time but the only time we spoke to each other was when i got there and we said hello to each other. i then proceeded to beg my dad for us to leave earlier (the party finished at 11; it was only about 9-9:30) and then cried almost all the way home in the back of an uber. it physically hurt that we had drifted so much that we did not talk to each other at all, when at one point in our lives we were so close that we did almost everything together flash forward to today; we were at my grandparents for mother's day and across the road from my grandparents lived family friends we have known literally since i was born. out of their family of four, three of them were now living in qld and the dad had sold the house and was moving out today to go live with the rest of the family. he invited us in one last time and immediately i was hit again with that overwhelming feeling of nostalgia and was fighting back tears the entire time i was inside i feel like every friend that i drift apart from, they manage to move on just fine, but for me, everytime i have a conversation with them or go through old text messages i feel like i'm dying inside. does anyone else feel this or is it just me? i don't have any explanation for what i am feeling and i thought maybe someone else might have an answer

My extremely long rant about how my church sucks

replies: 4

You guys have no idea how sick I am of attending my local church, Seriously it is like the most hetero normative place you can imagine. About late last year, one of my pastors randomly inserted some homophobic nonsense into a sermon for zero reasons besides being human trash. It was something about how pastors who love and support LGBT+ deserved to die or other verbal garbage I really didn't want to listen to. If it could not get any worse some old ladies sitting behind me start cheering him on (which never happens since everyone in the church usually stays dead quiet. Another instance of my pastor's major bs was when we had an entire sermon about how in a (straight) marriage, the woman needs to be loved/cared for and the man needs to be respected. Now on face value, this doesn't sound all that bad, but my pastor heavily implies that men don't need to be as loved/cared for as the women do and that woman needs less respect than the man does. I believe that both partners in a relationship (regardless of gender) deserve an equal amount of respect and love. Stuff like this makes me miss my old Baptist church where not only did they rarely mentioned LGBT+ people at all, let alone complain about them/people who support them in the middle of a sermon (I mean they were probably still homophobic but at least they kept their mouths shut about it) but they had a much larger budget to do more fun and elaborate things. You could tell just by how many people were there (I think the total number was about a thousand) and how much space there was that it was supported by people who were quite financially well off. For example, our youth group (which I and one of my older sisters attended every week) did things like bowling, scavenger hunts, movie nights etc. Also every year there were camps you could go on for the summer break and Christmas in July ball (which isn't as high class as it sounds but it was still pretty fancy) where we went to another pretty high-end church that was fully catered and had hired performers. There was also this one time where we went to a youth gathering (a gathering of all the youth group from all the nearby churches) where everyone dressed like pirates and similar to the ball had food, entertainment, and performers.

I have no friends or social life at school

replies: 7

Hi my name's Bronson I am a 15 year old male who loves music who is turning 16 in a few weeks. I have shoulder length hair and a very friendly nature. However I am finding school very difficult as I cannot make friends. I always try to be kind to people but the kids at my school are very rude and are always causing trouble and they think they are cool gangsters as they listen to rap music about drugs and wear baggy clothes and caps back to front. They talk to other people like crap and use offensive language and topics like Gays, drugs and sex as daily conversations. I have had stuff said to my face almost weekely because people like to take advantage of my kind nature as a way to try and make me angry. Honestly since year 8 it's been a big downward spiral for me as I'm stuck at home with no soicial life. The kids are always wrestling in the corridors and grabbing hold of me as I walk past and the teachers have done nothing about it. One stage i got fed up of their crap at the end of year 8 and got into a fight. I was suspended for 5 days and they got no punishment. I'm in year 10 and i have learned to stay calm but at lunch breaks I go and isolate myself in the library studying corner as I feel when I go into the yard i'm treated as a target by the popular kids and i want to keep out of as much trouble as possible. All i want to do is to be a good true friend to people who will actually treat them fairly and take them out for lunch or buy a treat for but all i get is crap from popular kids who think they are the coolest gangsters in the hood. I just wish there were more friendy people around so i can have a peaceful happy life and enjoy company.

I just got my heart broken...AGAIN

replies: 2

Hiya, This is my first ever post at an online forum and the first ever time I'm actually doing something about heartache while having the terrible fits of crying and anxiety attacks. I have had depression for most of my life but in my family mental health was such a stigma that I was constantly told to wipe my tears and put a smile and move on. It was only this year I gathered the courage to get help and a diagnosis for depression and anxiety and I have actually grown a lot from therapy. UNTIL... Well, I met a boy, we were going out for a few months and he was meant to be a rebound (As if that ever works) from a previous long term relationship which actually ended quite badly. Fast forward the great time we had together, he decided to end things with me yesterday. We went for a nice walk and I knew exactly what was gonna happen, I saw it coming. He said to me "You're just not the person I want to be with. I want a relationship where I can be my partner's best friend and I can't have that with you. And I don't want to hurt you if our feelings get stronger with each other" Fair enough. I understand. It was the right thing to do. We weren't gonna last. We weren't compatible. It was just REAL BAD TIMING. I have my wace exams in 3 weeks. I am really trying hard to deal with my depression and I am SO anxious all the time and this just made it worse. COVID like many families impacted mine too financially and emotionally. It impacted my performance at school. It affected me more than I thought it would. Truth be told. I really miss him. I have this terrible habit of caring too much about people who aren't gonna stick around in my life and this just another repetition that's swallowed me up and consumed my emotions. I just cannot stop the crying. I cannot deal with the fact that yet another person just walked out of life so easily. And what really gets me is that he's gonna be fine cause he's done this before to so many people. Its me whose left feeling empty and sad and alone because again I gave too much of myself away to someone who didn't deserve it. I'm just not coping with this little inconvenience with everything else that's going down in my life right now. I was doing well after getting help with therapy and this just really ruined my progress and I am honestly really scared of feeling this way again. Thanks for reading.

I think I don't know what to do with my life

replies: 2

I am 23 year old who graduated from University with a Bachelor of Commerce, majoring in Professional Accounting. I am also currently working as a casual junior accounts payable officer where I received shift on call. I was planning to start my post graduate degree early next year but I don't know which areas of study I want to study in. I am genuinely don't know what to do with my life in the future. One moment, I want to become an accountant and then next moment, I want to start my post graduate degree because I was struggling with finding full time accountant work and with the recession going on in response to COVID-19, it was mostly likely that I will start my post-graduate degree in finance or IT (Information Technology). I was hoping if I could get some advice from this forum and I really appreciate your time and effort. Thank you

Career counselling

replies: 2

Are they any career counselling services for depressed people for a fee? Because I don't see studying re towards my degree anyway because keep getting depressed... and because I've been doing a reduced course load in the first place; I have all the memories of struggling to concentrate etc... And I look online and there's career counselling services but I don't think they are meant for people currently depressed or irritable... Oh, but I'm over 25 so I wouldn't qualify for Headspace advertised stuff... Like a psychiatrist who didn't know what they were talking about re area of study tell me I was letting myself down re changing degrees re shorter period of time and more relevant...

I hate myself

replies: 4

I do. I have always felt this way. I hate how obnoxious I usually sound and even though it's is not hard for me to make friends, but it's hard maintaining them. The thing is that I was a people pleaser. I used to act how others wanted me to act. So I used to be hard on myself when people wouldn't like me and make a list of how I can please them. It was exhausting. And moreover, I could never feel close to others because in my mind I always knew that none of them knew the real me. I felt alone. So I decided to change that. I thought this year I will focus all the attention on myself and will not care what others think of me. For that ofc I had to remove all the toxic people from my life to have a new head start (that was the hardest). It is October now, and right when I thought that I would not hate myself and love me for the way I am, it is so hard. For a very long time I have avoided all these flaws in me that it is hard to accept them all over again. I do have a best friend btw (she lives in a different country, I am an international student), and she keeps telling me that although I do act crazy but that is normal, everybody is annoying in one way or the other- they just don't know it. And she's right (wish I was one of them . Life would've been so much easier. But it is not. And the worst, real me is so obnoxious. I don't like her, but I want to because I know this is what I am. And I am this way because of all the rejections, hurt and abandonment. And it is okay to feel this way. But it is hard.

I took a break to work on my mental health but all I did for months is stay home, and watch shows.

replies: 1

Hi, So, the title pretty much says it all. This year, my mental health took a turn for the worst. I've been suffering from depression and anxiety for a few years. I think it has been snowballing for a long time but this Spring, it just spiralled out of control. I began having panic attacks, even at home in bed where I should've felt most safe and comfortable. My anxiety stopped me from working at my casual job for months on end; there were too many occasions where I would call in sick because my anxiety just made me feel so sick, nauseous and dizzy. I sought help from my uni's counsellor but he was no help at all. All he was wanted to talk about was my life as a student and not my life outside of my studies which affected me mentally. It got to the point where I could not leave my house because of how bad my physical symptoms of anxiety were. So, when I couldn't attend my internship and had to drop out of the program I decided it was time to drop out of Uni temporarily this year to focus and recover my mental health. However, all I found myself doing was watching TV, Netflix and sleeping. I don't do much else. I tried to find hobbies to enjoy but I don't find myself enjoying anything. Is this self-care? I can't tell if I'm putting myself down the rabbit hole even further or if I'm helping myself recover. The stress and responsibilities of Uni have stopped, but my life stress and obligations are still the same. I'm an assistant caretaker for a family member and am relied on to help our family finances. With COVID making it difficult to get shifts (I only work short shifts 2 times a week), and even more difficult to find a second job the stress of it all becomes too much sometimes. Sometimes, I can't help but feel ashamed that I couldn't continue with Uni while dealing with my life obligations. There are so many people who deal with so much more than me but still push on. I've been asking myself why couldn't I do the same...

Eeep! When study is overwhelming! - Tips, ideas and coping strategies replies: 51

NEW TO THIS FORUM? Please read this first replies: 0

Understanding your emotions - why they’re happening replies: 2

Finding someone to help me. replies: 1

painful nostalgia feeling? replies: 3

My extremely long rant about how my church sucks replies: 4

I have no friends or social life at school replies: 7

I just got my heart broken...AGAIN replies: 2

I think I don't know what to do with my life replies: 2

Career counselling replies: 2

I hate myself replies: 4

I took a break to work on my mental health but all I did for months is stay home, and watch shows. replies: 1