During many holiday breaks, a lot of students go on vacation with their families and friends or stay at home to work on homework or hang out with old friends. What a lot of them don’t do is relax. They don’t take time for themselves.There needs to be time to rejuvenate and enjoy life without letting it pass by so quickly that it can’t be experienced. Routines need to be broken.

Long breaks when students don’t have class for entire days at a time can be exciting, but they can also be a great time to do something different. Make a change in the routine that college life often leads to.

When the holiday breaks are over, most students feel as though the time passed too quickly, and they wish to have it all again. The change in routine may be what students enjoy the most, seeing different people at home and being somewhere different, not on campus.

Changing gears is an important aspect of productivity. We cannot do the same things over and over, having the same routines and the same thoughts. We need to expand our minds.

Everything we do on campus is routine. Most students take the same routes to class, see the same people and even sit in the same seats in every classroom.

Sometimes it is a comfort. They don’t have to think as much. They put themselves on auto-pilot, listening to their MP3 players, ignoring everything around them.

What if, for one day, we all did things differently? What if we all took different routes to class and didn’t listen to music along the way? What if we sat next to people we didn’t know and actually had conversations with them?

Our horizons would broaden with every new step. We would learn or see or do something different that would trigger our minds to react differently than it did the day before. Intelligence grows from stimulating our brains. Some of us are shy, and we like the comfort zones we have created for ourselves. To be frank, we just don’t want to take different routes to class because it might be longer, which means we have to wake up earlier.

Reading is a great solution. Not textbook reading or assigned readings for class, though. It needs to be reading for pleasure – that book we have all set on the bookshelf and forgotten about. It is not a waste of time; it is not something to put on the back burner of your mind.

Changing gears. That is what we really need. We need change. We need to allow our eyes, ears and every other sense to experience something different. We will undoubtedly be surprised at the decrease in stress and tension if we just allow some change.

Marissa Warms is a junior advertising/public relations major from Irving. Her column appears Fridays.