As a teenager, your life revolves around two main priorities: your Grade Point Average (GPA) and your friends. You struggle with all your responsibilities and never have enough time to balance both school work and your social life.

Finding balance as a teen is challenging but it is still important. Here is a guide on how you can balance your social life with your academic life.

What you and your parents want

There is a common misconception that to be successful, you need to have good grades. Although having good grades may factor into success, good grades don’t guarantee a good life. However, this just means that GPA doesn’t need to be your main focus. If you only focus on grades and neglect social life, you tend to miss out on important experiences, like friendships.

Being a teenager, you want to go shopping, play sports, watch movies, or just have fun hanging out with friends. That’s natural. However, sometimes socializing is not all there is to life as a teenager.

How to balance school and friends

Both friends and GPA are important and you need to learn when to prioritize your GPA and when to prioritize your friends. For example, during exam week, the obvious choice is to focus on your exams. But when you are done with exams, hanging out with friends can be a great way to relax and unwind.

Realize that you are unbalanced

Most students and teenagers don’t know that they are not balancing their school and social life healthily. Some students are either too focused on their grades or too focused on their social life. Others may be overwhelmed when they want to focus on both their academic life and social life at the same time.

Balancing

Those who are too focused on GPA need to step back a little from Taiwan’s toxic education environment to make room for their social life. On the other hand, those who are too focused on friends need to pull back on socialization and pay attention to education more. All people need both academic and social skills.

Here are a few ways you can avoid being too academic or social:

• Forming a study group
• Going on mini field trips to museums, galleries, libraries, etc.
• Participating in projects
• Participating in, or starting, clubs

These activities both require a blend of both social and academic skills. Doing any of these activities would force you to go out of your comfort zone. For example, study groups would force you to study through socializing and communicating with other people who have different perspectives.

One important idea to remember is if you think you are not balancing your academic and social lives well, you should not immediately change your whole lifestyle. For example, if you think you are too focused on GPA you should not just drop your school work and start to socialize 24/7. You should instead choose activities that are a mix of both aspects.

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Balancing friends and GPA is all about discovering what you need. If you are already GPA-oriented, try to socialize more and build a life outside academics. If you are socially oriented, learn to invest in your studies. Life should be a healthy mix with awareness of where you need to improve.