The yuletide season spurs excitement and giddiness among people, but it can also be a time that people dread-what with finals and term papers due this week or the next. It’s a little less than a month before Christmas, and students tend to mellow down by this time since they’re all thinking about the holidays.

But then they couldn’t celebrate just yet because there’s still two and a half more weeks until the end of the semester. We want the days to go by faster, but then we kind of don’t want to face the finals head-on. We feel like we need more time to catch up on missed lectures and assignments.

With all the commercials, catalogs coming in the mail and holiday gimmicks all around us, we tend to be distracted. Especially with the hype around holiday shopping and all those marketing schemes that corporations are expected to do this time of the year, such as mall sales. We digress from what’s required of us to do because we have our minds conditioned to check out what gifts we should buy.

And as if all of these distractions are not enough to veer us away from what we actually ought to do, something comes along and makes life more complicated during winter: The Seasonal Affective Disorder. Less sunlight might be the culprit for those winter blues, and according to the National Mental Health Association, “SAD is a mood disorder associated with depression episodes and related to seasonal variations of light.” You might be feeling S.A.D if you have symptoms such as: depression, characterized by excessive eating and sleeping during the winter months, and atypical mood disorders.

It’s tempting to curl up on the couch with a fleece blanket and drink hot chocolate all day, and it’s easy to forget about work and school so we can have a good time with friends. Everybody wants this semester to be over, so let’s all just forget school, right?

But the thing is, we can’t just drop everything because we’re psyched to go on vacation already. If we quit now, we would be haunted by the fact that we messed up this semester.

It is hard to learn discipline but it is one of the most important things we have to learn. It might be boring to go to school at times, sitting in a math class can be a real drag, and opting for that W is tempting. But when are we going to get things done if we always continue to put it off?

We need to set limits for ourselves and learn how to work within those boundaries.

If we don’t have an idea of what we want to do or what we don’t want to do, then when the time to make a decision comes, we act on impulse-which is not the wisest way to act because we tend to regret what we have done, most of the time.

Everybody might feel overwhelmed at some point, but the key to reducing stress is to avoid thinking of everything all at once. The student who attacks his problems upfront-like being completely engrossed in studying-might forget to sleep or even eat and this can be damaging to his health. But then the other student who tries to escape from facing stress directly will never get anything done, because of his continuous avoidance. Taking things in small sizes lets us do more rather than guzzling everything in one big gulp.

Still, being attentive in class when everybody else is wrapping up gifts is almost impossible, and going to lectures may be painfully dragging, but if we stick out and try to bring that borderline B- to an A, at least we would get a peace of mind and we can enjoy the holidays more.

When everything is really over, we can have all the fun we want during the break-like visiting friends, buying presents for that special someone, eating dinner with the relatives and when possible, taking enough dosages of sunlight to avoid getting SAD.