It’s that time of the semester when everyone needs a break. Luckily, Thanksgiving is only a few days away. How you are going to use your break?

You’ve spent months working hard. You’ve had classwork, homework, papers, exams, extracurricular activities, and maybe even a job. Now you need some time to calm down and recharge.

All that hard work can take a toll on your body. You’re likely feeling very tired from the hard work and the resulting lack of sleep. If you’re attending school in a climate where it’s starting to get colder, there’s a higher chance of getting sick, because students are indoors more and therefore around more people, increasing the chances of getting exposed to germs, including the flu. If you’re already weak from lack of sleep, your immune system is also weakened, which makes you get sick even more easily.

All the hard work also can take a toll on your mind and make you stressed. Instructors typically give exams just before Thanksgiving, adding to the potential for stress. Besides the extra sleep you can get during break, you’ll hopefully be able to get rid of stress by spending time relaxing, which helps decrease your risk of depression, obesity, and heart disease. It also boosts your immune system.

Even while you sleep and relax during break, don’t forget to do some schoolwork, so you don’t come back to school completely unprepared for the end of the semester. You’ll have only 2-3 weeks left, and those weeks can get extremely frantic if you don’t prepare for them correctly. You don’t want final exams and final papers to catch you off guard, and if you’re dealing with applications to graduate school or other programs like study abroad, you don’t want to find that you don’t have any time to handle them.

The key to Thanksgiving break, or any break, is to strike a balance. You definitely need to recharge and get your body and mind ready to finish the semester. At the same time, you don’t want to slide too far behind in your studies when you have (depending on your school) 5-7 open days to move forward and better prepare for the return to school after Thanksgiving Break is over. Treat the days of a break like you might treat a long weekend. If all you do during a break is work, then you miss the point of having one. If you don’t work at all, you miss an opportunity to stay on track.