The holidays are drawing to a close, the sun is shining, the happy little ducklings are paddling on the river, and there on the horizon –  inexorable as death or the General Election – is the darkly looming inevitability of Exam Term Boasting.

You know the phenomenon I mean because I guarantee it has already shown up on at least one of your social media feeds, or you’ve overheard it in the college bar, or an acquaintance you don’t like much but still feel compelled to stop and talk to has said it to you outside Sainsbury’s one afternoon. It probably went something along the lines of: “I worked ALL holiday but I’m still feeling SO behind!!!”, “that moment when you’re the last one in the library at 2 a.m. and you re-evaluate your life choices”, “OMG I’ve been getting less than 4 hours of sleep a night for the last two weeks”, etc. etc. etc.

Guys, hold up: this is a problem and we need to stop.

I understand where the urge to say this stuff comes from (I mean, only today I myself wrote a silly tweet about "being stuck in the library too long" and then immediately regretted it). Maybe you heard someone else stressing about how they’d ‘only’ done seven hours of work today and felt the need to publicly reassure yourself that you were working hard enough as well. Maybe you were full of anxiety about revision and wanted to get some social media validation but didn’t want to seem ‘too desperate’. Maybe you’re just kind of a show-off and you straight-up wanted to brag/humblebrag. Whatever.

The latter motivation aside, I know this kind of statement isn’t meant maliciously and certainly isn’t consciously intended as a dig at other people. But that’s pretty much what it always ends up being. A lot of the time in publicly assuaging your own anxieties about the amount of work you’re doing, you end up worsening everyone else’s. Every “LOL 8 hours in the library, they should install showers!” Facebook status you write leads directly to someone quietly freaking out about the fact that they’ve only done four hours (or one, or none, etc. etc.). Your speech and actions, sorry to say it, actually do have consequences, and at a time when everyone here is full to the brim of work-related neuroses, that’s something that you’ve got to be aware of.

This kind of thoughtless broadcasting of exactly how much and how often you’re pushing yourself with your revision causes more problems than just stressing other people out. It also perpetuates a really harmful homogeneity of work styles and revision methods, and forces lots of very different people to measure themselves up to someone else’s standard, even when that standard may not be relevant to them at all. Take the person who read your “8 hours in the library” post and is currently fretting about their own inferiority, for example – an 8-hour work stint might not be useful for them at all, because they’re the kind of person who revises more effectively in short intense bursts with long breaks in the middle. Perhaps focusing on spending more time in the library would be pointless, because they find libraries oppressive and claustrophobic, and they work way better in cafés or in their room with a friend. Maybe they don’t even need to be worrying about revising yet anyway because they know that if they started now they’d peak too early and be burnt out by the time their exams arrived. In an atmosphere of heightened stress the easiest thing to do is to compare your own methods negatively to what seem to be the most prevalent ones. But everyone works differently, not everyone’s methods will work for other people, and (cliché approaching, sorry) working harder isn’t always working smarter or more effectively.

Public Exam Term Boasting is also a major contributor to a toxic competitive atmosphere around exams and work in general that we’re probably all familiar with here. This kind of competition is most annoying because it’s totally unnecessary. I’m baffled and frustrated by the fact that the modus operandi of people at this university is to get into ridiculous public battles as to who’s spent more hours working, and to crouch protectively over their revision notes or past paper questions as if they contain state secrets and shielding them from the view of potential library traitors is vital to national security. This really isn’t the only way to do exam term! Sure, some people at Cambridge are headed straight for high-powered City jobs and in the Game of Stock Markets you win or you die, but most of us are just people, for whom competetiveness is not a vital skill right now, who can and should help each other with stuff because that’s the decent thing to do and everyone benefits from it. My revision has been made massively more interesting and less daunting by friends sending me their notes, coming up with ideas when I wonder aloud about an essay argument, recommending me books I might not have thought of otherwise. The recently founded Whose University? Subject Solidarity group on Facebook, with shared documents full of revision tips and people helping each other (in less than 24 hours the group managed to crowdsource downloads of Art History past papers when the faculty took them offline this week, for example), is a perfect example of an alternative way of doing revision that doesn’t involve that kind of pointless dog-eat-dog attitude.

The vicious cycle of revision anxiety, in which one person's anxious revision bragging leads to other people’s revision anxiety, is grim and rubbish and we need to try to stop it. By boasting about how we’re overworking ourselves, we’re legitimising a harmful culture where overwork becomes not only the norm but a perceived necessity. We can choose not to write that Facebook status or talk about it loudly in the common room, to take our understandable revision worries and need for validation to a friend in private instead. By choosing not to engage we’re looking out for ourselves and for other people – something that isn’t really encouraged here but definitely should be. We’re just making things less shit.