I totally get what you're saying, bpcyclist, and I agree to an extent. I am overloaded for my current mental state. I don't have enough time to do a fair amount of activities that keep me physically and mentally happy. The unfortunate part is that I will have to wait until next semester to make these changes. I can't cut out credits this late in the semester because they'd count against me; the deadline to drop a class without negative consequences has passed. I'd be given an automatic failure in the class(es) I dropped and that would dramatically hurt my GPA, which would be fine if I wasn't headed into veterinary school, considered one of the most competitive graduate programs in the US.

I love my job and I believe it would do more mental harm than good to quit. Despite being a stressful job, I handle on-the-spot stress very well and I get to laugh and socialize at my job more than anywhere else. I love my coworkers, I love the animal patients I get to work with. My boss is very willing to work with my schedule and they cut my hours back by about 75% when I transitioned from summer break to fall semester.

I've already cut back on my clubs a lot. People might argue that the clubs are the fun and social parts of my schedule I should keep, but sometimes, meetings just feel like a social obligation that I go out of my way to worm into my schedule. I only show up to the ones that are convenient to me and that I think will be fun.

I'm definitely not cutting back on my horse riding. It's definitely what I look forward to the most in my week, and I often find myself wishing I could spend more time going to the stable. It's my mental escape.

I know it's not a good excuse, but I feel like I should be able to handle this workload anyway. Last semester, I had an identical academic load (19 credits of high level biology) and general schedule except I had an additional part-time job on top of the one I currently have. I ended the semester with all As, not even a single A-. I do understand there is a difference between surviving and thriving, but honestly, I did not feel extremely overloaded last semester. I felt just as happy as I had the previous 20 years of my life. I do think the difference is all the unrelated emotional stressors I've had throughout the summer. Even just being in the car crash without all the other things that happened would have been enough to really mess up a lot of people's mental states.