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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Struggling this year (like many others)

replies: 5

At the start of this year I was super motivated and happy to be able to start uni and put my high school days behind me. Although now, in the 10th month of the year I have never felt worse. I cannot get out of my bed, I cannot attend my lectures online, my sleep schedule is all over the place, I can barely make it to the shower, I can't keep up with assessments, I have gained so much weight in such a short amount of time and eat at strange hours, I have isolated myself from friends and family out of pure embarrassment. My grandmother messaged me the other day to say she had noticed I gained a lot of weight and she was worried about my health. I realise that I have but the problem is I have absolutely no motivation left in me to possibly change even if I want to so badly. I beat myself up because I cannot even do daily simple tasks to look after myself and I feel like I am wasting people's time and my money by being at uni and not being able to keep up with everything. I feel like I have completely lost myself this year. I loved going out, seeing people, meeting new people, I am super extroverted, I was passionate about my course at uni and now all I do is nothing but sit around like a numb blob, wasting space. I moved to Australia 3 years ago from South Africa and for a while I was doing great but once it set in that I had left such important family behind it has broken me. I have a constant debate with myself that I am just being lazy and need to get my shit together but then think about how I can't even make it to the shower and realise there is a much bigger issue going on. I recently missed an assessment and this was the point where I messaged the uni counselor to ask to speak to her. We have scheduled a time to speak but until then I don't even k ow if I can get through the week and do assessments and attend lectures. I feel like such a lost cause and would really like to hear from others

overachiever who doesn't know how to seek help

replies: 2

Hi, I'm very new to seeking help because I've been denying that I need it and am still in doubt. Honestly I don't know where to start but let's start with not being able to sleep at night. I'm not sure if that's a symptom of something but the reason I can't sleep is because of my tendency to overthink things and doubting myself and the future that lies ahead of me. On the surface I seem perfectly fine to everyone around me, a typical overachiever. I have a purpose in life but I have failed once before in trying to pursue my dream career. I know I'm still young and by no means have I given up hope on my ability to reach my dreams but maybe being on a gap year and having nothing to do has allowed this feeling of being useless to creep in. My family are all very hard working and I wish I could be as well but nowadays my lack of sleep has made me very unproductive and it feels like a vicious neverending cycle of crying myself to sleep because I feel useless and being unproductive during the day. I'm still very much dependent on my Asian parents. During this gap year they think that I am always sleeping in and have nothing to do. They're not wrong but I really don't want to be like this, that's why I need help. What they don't know is how I can't sleep at night, how my pillow is often wet and how my dried tears sting when I wake up. I don't know how to tell them, they are all super busy. Don't get me wrong, they are very understanding and will probably listen to me when they're free but I'd feel extremely guilty and out of place. Unlike me my twin sister has succeeded where I failed before so I have lost my no.1 and only confidante, although I expected that would happen at the start of this year. The problem is that I don't know how to tell them I need help. My parents are always supportive of me and are always encouraging me to do things like volunteering and tutoring to fill my free time. Perhaps it would cure this feeling of uselessness but I need to address the fact that I lack energy and motivation everyday before being able to do those things. I don't like doing things unless I'm fully engaged and enthusiastic in doing it otherwise I feel guilty towards others I'm working with hence why I still feel absolutely useless. This is just one thing I struggle with. A lot of the other things have been discussed by others, such as my inability to be myself around people outside of my family. For now I don't want to lose that ability completely. What should I do?

why can't i make friends

replies: 3

i don't even know why i am posting this, i guess it's just easier when i can write everything down and not try to explain it to someone. Every year i try to make friends and it goes okay and then it's like i slowly start to pull away and all my friends go in one direction and i'm left all alone. Ever since i can remember i would try my best to make friends and fit in but i still ended up feeling lonely towards the end of the year. I like being on my own and i think that is part of the problem. I want to just have space to relax and do my own thing and in doing so i think people just end up leaving me alone. I have extreme social awkwardness and anxiety. I struggle to make a conversation with people outside my immediate family like cousins and family friends who i have known all my life. So making friends is absolutely terrifying and difficult. I think one of the things i struggle with is my sister who is two years older than me. She goes out with her friends almost every day and comes home late every night. She is always making fun of me and saying i don't have any friends. I have one friend but she's not very nice and picks on me all the time. Last year she told the whole school that i punched her. lots of people came up to me and were being really rude. We eventually made up after a few weeks but I lost most of my friends because of that. She makes fun of me and tells really mean jokes about me but she's been my friend for 5 years and if i stop being friends with her i will have no one to sit with. School starts back on Monday and i am terrified. We have been at home in quarantine for almost three months and my social skills have declined even further. My homeroom teacher started making me see the school psychologist a few months ago but i don't know how i'm meant to talk about everything. I just feel all alone all the time and even when i hang with other people it just makes me want to go sit alone because i don't know how to connect and fit in to their conversations. I keep asking my mum to let me move schools which might be terrifying to some people but i just want a fresh start where no one knows me and i can just be myself. I had one friend who i felt like actually knew me and i could talk to and open up to but she moved back to England at the end of last year. i have tried everything i play lot's of sports, i join school clubs but i always feel like im in this bubble and i don't know how to get out. Please i need help i don't know what to do.

Constant jealousy and possessiveness over boyfriend.

replies: 7

Hello to whoever has clicked onto this thread. I’m an 19 year old female who has been with her boyfriend since February 2019. I don’t know where to start. These things are hard to put into words. We have a good relationship. He treats me well and respects me at all times. Just at the beginning of our relationship we did have some ups and downs. We had people trying to get between us and it caused some arguments. Fast forward a couple months and we are happy and in a healthy relationship. We love each other so much and all is well. This year before COVID came along, he went out one night with friends and decided to flirt with another girl. All they did was flirt but it ruined everything. I haven’t been able to trust him the same. We have spoken about it a million times and yes he regrets it so much and swears black and blue he would never do it again. Technically he didn’t physically cheat but I see it as him emotionally cheating on me. He seeked the attention of another woman and I just can’t understand why. If you knew the two of us you would never think we would hurt each other because we truly are in love and seem like the happiest and strongest couple ever. It’s just since then, I’ve become possessive and I hate it. I’m continuously jealous. I try to avoid watching movies with decent looking girls in it because I don’t want him to “check them out”, I get super jealous when I see him liking photos of other girls on Instagram (I’ve spoken to him about this and he has stopped it but I know he still does it here and there), I feel sick at the thought of him thinking someone else is better than me, I continuously try to change myself so he will always want me, and there’s so much more. I’ve had to delete social media because I always go on his account and see him following all these new girls full of Botox and it just makes me feel so sh*tty and makes me feel like I need to change myself all the time. I continuously cry over this because I hate feeling and being like this. Ive even started to have dreams of him physically cheating on me and it kills me!!!! I’ve become a toxic person and it’s gotten to the point where the way I’m feeling is absolutely ridiculous and I feel stupid for even telling him half the things I’m feeling. I just want to get better. I hate being like this. I hate constantly being jealous and possessive. I just love him so much and I don’t want to lose him to someone else.

New here and just want to let out some thoughts

replies: 24

Hi, As I’ve mentioned this is my first time posting on a forum. Um, so I just wanted to talk about mood swings and how it’s affecting my life so far. I’m at uni currently and just switched courses because my previous one made me so miserable, mostly because of my fluctuating mood. I couldn’t bring myself to do much work on most days because my mind was filled with thoughts about how I don’t deserve to be there and how I’m not capable enough. I should probably mention that I have experienced these thoughts for many years and have had mood swings for the same amount. I initially chalked it down to hormones seeing how it coincided with my teenage years but later on I began to think that maybe that’s not it. At one point in the last few years, I found myself attending therapy where I was diagnosed with mild depression. My main concern is with my studies, because I’ve become avoidant of my responsibilities towards my degree because well... it scares me. I want to go on to study educational psychology myself in the future (hopefully) but my mental health may become an issue as it’s stood in the way of my passion before. I really would like to get better but I just don’t know how. If anyone could share strategies that have worked for them or someone they know I’d greatly appreciate it.

Body dysmorphic disorder

replies: 3

I need help. If anyone here has suffered from body dysmorphia, please tell me things you did to get better. I can’t even look at myself without crying.

I’m not sure what wrong

replies: 1

Hi everyone! It my first time posting here because I’m not sure what to do. April this year I started getting headaches throughout the day. They were annoying but I could keep doing normal stuff and work. After they persisted for over 6 weeks I took my self off to my GP. My GP ran blood tests, sent me for blood pressure monitoring (it was a bit high), checked my heart, kidneys. And then finally sent me for a head CT and by this point I started feeling nauseous throughout the day. The week it took for the results to get back I noticed I lost nearly 10kgs possibly due to feeling sick. The CT results came back crystal clear (thank god) and I mentioned that I had been feeling sick and he then sent me for an abdomen CT, not so lucky this time around, the results showed “thickening in the bowel wall” and my GP sent me back to a gastroenterologist who sent me to hospital for a camera (both ends lol - sorry) this took nearly a month to happen and during this time I was a mess, crying on the shower floor, deflated, I was so convinced that I had bowel cancer or something major. A Month passed and the cameras came back all clear, visually (still waiting for the biopsy results) while waiting for the camera I started to shake in my hands and feet at random times. I went back to my GP and he told me that “I just need to chill and relax” and told me to come back in 6 months. I went off to see another doctor for a second opinion and I’ve developed a new symptom of tingling hands and feet (random times), she sent me for some blood tests to check for auto immunity issues and just to be sure referred me to a rheumatologist, my mum has auto immune issues, yet to have the appointment. And now I’m sitting here waiting for results on Monday thinking that maybe the headaches started as a bit of stress and then all the possible medical issues triggered anxiety that I can’t shake. I’ve never been an anxious person before either. I guess I want to know if I ask my GP for something to stop it will they give it to me on the spot, I’ve been feeling like this for over 6 months and it’s affecting my life and I need some relief. Now I’m left with headaches still, shaking hands/feet, I’m always tired, I hardly sleep and I feel like I’m fixating on my health. But I honestly feel like there is something wrong with me either mentally or physically. Thats my story.

I'm the weird one out there

replies: 2

anyone can relate them being the left-out one/ background friend in a group? I'm a new immigrant from Asia and have been in Australia for nearly a year. Because in my homeland we don't speak English frequently, or maybe it's just my English level is below average, i often can't express what i truly want to say. when my classmates are starting interesting conversations, i tried to engage in it by speaking a few words or giving some reactions. but it turns out i'm the one ruining the vibe. it becomes awkward whenever i speak and people will look at me with a face that says 'i don't understand what you're saying/ what are you doing here?'. even some international students have done a better job than me. they have the good social skills that i don't have and manage to fuse into a friend group within a week or 2. this doesn't work for me. it has almost been a year, and it seems that i don't have someone i could call as a 'true friend'. from the next week onwards i will be going back to school, and struggling during every lesson, recess and lunchtime to find someone to talk to. some classmates, who are so kind-hearted, will try to talk to me and ask me to be groupmate during group project. i'm so thankful for them for not letting me feel left-out, but at the same i feel extremely guilty, because they could have partnered their close friends. they could have spent their time happily with friends joking around, but instead, they choose me. i feel i have to at least not being that boring, but my mind goes blank every time. the conversation turns out to be dull and didn't last for long. when i realize that i could have made a joke afterwards, it's always too late.

everything is becoming so much

replies: 3

hi everyone, hope you all had a great day i dont really know how to start this but i really need help and support with something in my life right now i have really bad depression, it kind of comes and goes like waves but i recently have had a really bad depressive episode. i didn't ever want to get out of bed and i didn't want to go out at all, instead trying to get myself out this hole i found myself in, i turned to abusing drugs instead to cope with the pain. over a 2 week period i was constantly drunk, stoned, never sober. the drugs gave me this false sense of happiness and sercuity which i dont really have in my life right now. im trying to stop using doing drugs but it is so so hard when all you want is that high, im still struggling but idk who to talk to about this i hate the person i've become i want to change not only for myself but the others around me, but i dont know how to stop any advice or support would be appreciated

I feel different

replies: 1

I don’t really know how to start this but here goes nothing. I have recently started uni after graduating high school last year. I did well in high school, nothing amazing but I got into the course I wanted. I’m not good in new social situations and considered going to an online uni for the sole purpose to get an education without the stress of a new social life and environment. I have been struggling more than I had expected. I never missed high school other than for being sick and now find myself missing quiet a few lessons. I have stopped eating breakfast on most days and my personal hygiene is lower. I don’t know if this is because I’m am struggling because of a new environment, the difficult year or if there’s something more to it. Like depression, anxiety or autism. I look at symptoms and signs and find myself matching up to them. I don’t know if I am making these up or if they are really there. Or if they are as bad or as often as I think. I don’t know if I am convincing myself of these signs or if I’m convincing myself I don’t have them. I haven’t spoken to my high school friends in weeks and don’t have anyone I really talk to at uni, besides trying to small talk when someone else initiates a conversation. I also don’t have anyone that I really feel comfortable talking to and thought this might be a good place to start.

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

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

Struggling this year (like many others) replies: 5

overachiever who doesn't know how to seek help replies: 2

why can't i make friends replies: 3

Constant jealousy and possessiveness over boyfriend. replies: 7

New here and just want to let out some thoughts replies: 24

Body dysmorphic disorder replies: 3

I’m not sure what wrong replies: 1

I'm the weird one out there replies: 2

everything is becoming so much replies: 3

I feel different replies: 1