It’s common for many college students to put increasing amounts of pressure on themselves to stay motivated and productive. 

Putting pressure on yourself serves an obvious purpose. It pushes you to get things done, reach your goals and persevere through obstacles. 

The problem with pressuring yourself to power through challenges is that it often involves negative self-talk and threats against yourself. 

This creates an unhealthy mindset of determination fueled by stress and anxiety. Indeed, it is motivating, but it is also destructive. 

This pressure problem isn’t only experienced by overachievers or anxious people. Everyone has experienced a situation where they’ve pressured themselves to get something accomplished. 

Some students pressure themselves to pass a class while others pressure themselves to keep a 4.0 GPA. The benchmark of success looks different for everyone, but all of us are working toward a goal that we need to stay motivated to achieve. 

There are several paths you can take that will end with you reaching a goal. One path toward accomplishment is uplifting, rewarding and generally stable. Another path toward accomplishment is draining, stressful and generally unstable. 

You don’t want to look back at your college experience and realize you walked the unnecessarily miserable path toward success.

You can find the same motivational feeling you get from putting pressure on yourself by supporting yourself and staying disciplined. 

Supporting yourself often requires a genuine commitment to meeting your own needs. By nurturing your mind and body, you can unlock a surprising amount of energy. 

Discipline can come from a place of self-love and encouragement. It doesn’t require beating yourself up. 

College isn’t boot camp. You don’t have to scare or shame yourself into doing things.. You can be successful without using intolerance and rigidity.

One thought experiment that has helped me put less pressure on myself is trying to understand why I might default to the negative mindset first.

Your mind is just trying to help you survive. If you desperately needed water, that mindset of determination fueled by stress and anxiety would be a blessing, helping you push through the effects of dehydration until you could find a water source. 

If you have your basic needs met, your mind can employ the same types of signals once used to motivate your ancestors to now motivate you to chase after that scholarship or job interview. 

The stakes aren’t the same, though. The world has changed so much in such a short period that we can barely keep up. 

I’m all for trusting your instincts, but getting your assignment turned in is farther removed from your fundamental needs than your brain sometimes thinks. 

If you’re crumbling under the pressure or you don’t know how much more stress you can take, you have to put your experience into perspective. 

This isn’t life or death, this is college.