Should I stay home? How to: know if you should stop going out

At uni, it’s easy to feel like you’re not doing enough. You’re surrounded by highly ambitious people, and to your eyes, they are always doing more than you. 

How can your friend always score above 75, work, and have a boyfriend? How can your flatmate be the president of that big society, do sports, and have it all figured out for after graduation? 

If you often feel like this, rest assured that you’re not alone. Self-doubt is very common, especially among women, who are statistically proven to be more likely than men to underestimate their abilities. 

But do not stress. There is an easy solution to your problem, one that will ensure you’ll never be behind others. You must stop going out, never see your friends again, and do not, for the life of you, ever step foot in another club− you might as well just throw away your career altogether if you do that again. 

If after this piece of advice, you’re about to close the magazine and tell your friends that WIB has gone crazy, you’re on the right track. If you were nodding along, please keep reading. 

Letting go of your social life to dedicate your full time to work is never the good way to go. Indeed, although you might feel like you’d have so much more time to dedicate to studying and working if you stop going out, research proves that socialising is incredibly important for people’s well-being and performance. 

At a physical level, having a social life contributes to being healthy, by reducing stress, boosting your immune system, and increasing life longevity as a whole. But if it’s work that you’re worried about, you’ll be surprised to know that being around friends can actually improve performance. Indeed, when engaging in a social activity, the brain uses a variety of functions and practices numerous skills, sharpening cognitive abilities, such as memory retrieval or speech. These skills are easily transferable to work and study settings. 

Moreover, socialising with peers or co-workers outside of uni can also help build relationships, create trust, and enhance teamwork. This can be very helpful if you are part of a society and want to ensure good communication and high productivity, or if you are having a group presentation. This is not to say that you should prioritise going out, but simply that finding a balance between work and social life is the winning move. 

Instead of sacrificing social activities, there are other ways to fight back against that feeling of not doing enough. First of all, remember not to compare yourself to others. It might be true that some of your friends are doing three extracurriculars at once, while you are only doing two, but not everyone is the same. People have different rhythms and can take on different workloads, and there is nothing wrong with that. At the end of the day it’s not the number of societies you were part of at uni, or that grade in your business paper that are going to define who you are or what your career is going to look like in 10 years. Second, try to talk to older students, or people you look up to for reassurance. As I’ve already pointed out, self-doubt is very common, so chances are that even they have felt the same way during their time at uni. 

So, take a deep breath, go for that coffee date, take a walk, and do not ditch your friends to work: you are on track with everyone else!