College exams. Life after graduation has its own stresses but nothing was more stressful to me than having 6-7 exams coming up and having to spend so much time and effort preparing for stuff I don't care about that much.
At some point it got so bad I'd wake up a few times at night drenched in sweat a day before exams. Yeesh. I guess it was partly my fault for taking it too seriously but I couldn't switch that off.
School in general. It was so much work. Homework is torture, at least now once my day is finished I don't have to worry about it until the next morning.
So few responsibilities while in school, though. I think about this often. I don't know how anyone stays on top of everything that needs doing as an adult. Work, bills, laundry, dishes, cleaning/tidying, cooking, meal planning, shopping, trash, recycling, healthy sleep,..... It's endless.
Now that you say it, actually highschool was pretty chill. I was living on my own in college, so it was your whole list, plus classes, plus homework, and that was the real hell.
That makes a lot of sense. I had an apartment when I was in grad school and I was working full time and commuting to school twice a week. That was a lot.
In grad school I was working full time and only taking two subjects per semester. It was so much easier than a full study load—I actually enjoyed it and had a much higher GPA than my undergraduate degree.
I went into the doctor one time explaining all these strange symptoms I was experiencing. Rapidly developing OCD, heart palpitations, it felt like I needed to pee all the time, etc. I thought maybe I was dying. College exams. It was stress. I was having my heart rate spike up to the point where my smartwatch was warning me several times a day. I haven't had it happen once since the day I graduated about 7 years ago.
It's unbelievable that going through that much stress is normalized.