After seeing amazing results from my one-day social media cleanse, I decided that it was time to take better care of myself and begin looking out for my mental health. As such, I made the difficult decision to temporarily abandon all of my distance learning responsibilities, which have really been putting a damper on my mental health.

       Because school is so stressful, I strongly believe it’s time to prioritize myself over the homework assignments. Actually, I should have started weeks ago.

To start my academic cleanse, I uninstalled the Google Classroom app from my phone to avoid the persistent notifications reminding me of every bad grade and late homework assignment. How could I possibly relax and take care of myself with all those toxic messages bombarding me throughout the day?

Now, rather than feeling stressed, I’m thankful for distance learning because I can take these breaks for my mental health. So, during my schoolwork cleanse, I made productive use of my time by scrolling through YouTube recommendations and my TikTok For You page, which are both efficient ways to make myself feel better, while I skipped my classes.

Although I was finally free from those annoying Google Classroom notifications, I later found out that my teachers had been emailing me about five missing assignments due on my mental health one-day vacation. These rude reminders really stressed me out at first, so I blocked their emails to take more time and better decompress from the pain of academics. 

On the same day as this cleanse, I also happened to miss two tests that my teachers had been talking about for weeks, of course by accident. Oops. Oh well. I still believe that my mental health is of much more importance than my grades, which I haven’t checked because I also uninstalled the Grades app–the impulse to check my grades was making me nervous 24/7, after all. They’re probably tanking, but I’m sure my teachers will be understanding of my mental health journey and give me extra credit.

Speaking of tanking grades, my classmates were constantly sending me rude messages about a group project that would affect their grades if I didn’t contribute. I think that it was extremely selfish for them to interrupt my precious mental health day for the sake of their own grades on this one insignificant project. For that reason, I muted their private messages and went to sleep–as one should during a proper mental health day.

When my relaxing 24 hours eventually came to an end, I concluded my mental health break by reinstalling Google Classroom and unmuting all other notifications. After checking my failing grades and looking at all the angry emails, I got stressed out all over again–I think tomorrow would be a good time for another mental health day.