The parking lot wasn’t huge. I stretched out one tiny foot over the edge of my car and prepared to jump; goggles in one hand, pool pass in the other, eyes on the prize — the check-in desk.

As a kid, I never wore shoes in the summer. It was a point of pride for me. I didn’t want their protection or constraint when I was outside. What I wanted was to be as free as possible, and shoes were a clunky, unnecessary accessory that inhibited cartwheels and climbing trees and chasing rabbits with my dog.

But as much as I despised them, even I couldn’t deny that shoes would have probably spared me the pain of going up against the parking lot pavement. The sun would heat the black mass enough that it burnt with every step.

Over the years I’ve gotten better at accessorizing with footwear and countless other things that only appear to limit freedom in lieu of functionality. But in no way does anything that seems unnecessarily structured come naturally to me.

Let me lay it out for you — we’re told to turn up the heat in college and push ourselves to our limits. To me, this means doing everything to the limit of my ability. I sacrifice my sleep schedule, what I’m sure would otherwise be an extremely healthy diet and my social life, in rotation, for my commitments. But I never really think it through. I live too much in the moment, sacrificing my current goals for my future ambitions, and frankly, as of late I’ve found this to be a questionable pattern that sometimes leaves me feeling like an unwilling participant in my own self-destruction.

It’s not a cycle I think I’m trapped in alone. I think there are a bunch of us in here all whirling around like socks trapped in a washing machine. So even though I’m not sure which choir I’m preaching to, I want to make the point that it’s important to be more careful with ourselves as we make our day-to-day decisions.

I took a philosophy class a few terms ago in which we learned about Aristotle’s golden mean and the art of achieving the middle between the two extremes of excess and deficiency. We discussed how excess seems to be more highly regarded than balance in this modern age. How those that ‘do’ more than average are the heroes of our everyday lives. We put them on pedestals because they push themselves to defy their human limits and we portray excessive achievement as admirable, rather than unhealthy. When we determine what we’re going to do, or how much we’re going to take on, I think we often base these decisions off of what we perceive other people’s judgments will be.

What should be admirable, and what we should base these decisions off of is how they will affect our personal health; and I want to make a point of stating that health is a compilation of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not a mere absence of disease.

It’s no easy task. College is an atmosphere in which we feel compelled to cast aside our well-being in favor of the current hour. Sometimes it’s necessary to pull an all-nighter or skip breakfast in order to make everything else work. But sometimes, taking better care of ourselves is easily achievable.

Watch fewer Netflix episodes. Skip Facebook stalking your ex, and the next day of trauma it will cause you. Eat when you’re hungry. Exercise when you have time. Don’t stay inside all day, explore the world around you. Be more spontaneous. And, most importantly, don’t forget to think about yourself.

In our endless drive to achieve something more, to do something more, to be more successful, there will eventually come a time when you will reach your breaking point. I’m only droning on and on about it because it happened to me pretty recently. I piled on commitment after commitment until one night I found myself in the sole company of a lit computer screen overstressed, undernourished and so sleep-deprived I was barely functioning on the level of Ozzy Osbourne. I closed my laptop and thought to myself how horrible it felt to be twenty years old, full of potential and devoid of energy.

I’m lucky because I’m young. I’m elastic. We twenty-somethings turn around from all-nighters and accidental episodes of near starvation like boomerangs. But that doesn’t mean that we always will.

Remember that overexertion can be a form of self-harm. Push yourself to your limits, but never past them. Don’t forget how hot the ground beneath you can get if you let yourself forget what’s important.

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