Back-To-School Reset: How to Prepare Mentally and Emotionally
- Tyler Pham
- Sep 23, 2025
- 2 min read
Introduction
August 25th is a day that most students, like myself, worry about; no more pulling all-nighters, no more sleeping until the afternoon. For me, as the days count down towards that day, my anxiety spikes—especially for incoming freshmen or rising seniors who are bombarded with new information and routines that they need to get adjusted to. You need not fear, however, you’ve already been faced with a situation like this before, many times. All you have to do is realize that you’ve survived once—and that you’ll survive again.
The Illusion of Change
Things seem a lot more intimidating before you actually do it. Think about going on a rollercoaster for the first time. You get nervous before, and after—you glow. Going back to school is no different from this type of feeling. For me, I like to think that everything will be okay in the end, and this type of fear will not be permanent. Think about the future, or the past, and you won’t be able to live in the present.
The Magic of Positivity
If you’ve ever heard of the glass-half-full, glass-half-empty idiom, this same glass-half-full mentality helps immensely with going back to school. Sit with the lingering pessimism of “how would my friends think of me after 3 months?” instead of “I get to see my friends again after 3 months”, and it’s no wonder that it’d be hard not to be scared of going back to school.
Alarms in your head, and on your nightstand
Sudden change is never good for anyone—it’s why Howard County and other public schooling systems are fully transparent about their calendars and when school starts. Most parents typically send their children to bed earlier when school is a few weeks around the corner. When I was a kid, I never saw why this was a necessity, as I didn’t need to go to sleep that early yet. Now, I realize that it was to stop the sudden change of going from sleeping late to sleeping earlier. Do everything at once, and you get overwhelmed. Do everything incrementally throughout a few weeks, and it’s just a bit more manageable.
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