hen Tioluwalase “Lase” Adelakun ‘26 was told he had been voted Most Chill, he almost couldn’t believe it.

“I was honestly very surprised. I feel like I often tweak about things,” he says with a laugh.

Leaned back in his chair, donned in a blue denim shirt and baggy leather jacket, silver rings glittering on his folded hands, Lase is the image of cool and calm. But this chillness, he insists, is not something that comes naturally. Instead, his journey to chillness has been an uphill climb.

Growing up, Lase says he struggled with anxiety in social situations, recalling a moment during an eighth-grade volunteering program when the group leader instructed everyone to exchange phone numbers.

“I remember standing there and literally being petrified. I could not move. And I was almost on the verge of tears because I was just like, ‘I’m so scared of talking to people,’” Lase says.

“It was just one of those things where I was like, ‘Okay, wait, I have to fix that. I can’t be like this for the rest of my life,’” he adds.

Since then, Lase has intentionally challenged himself to engage in social spaces, and to laugh off the times conversations don’t go to plan. He points us to this year’s Harvard-Yale tailgate, where he felt like he hit the “wrong dialogue every single time.” “You learn from it,” he says with a shrug.

When discussing chillness during what could be described as an “Epidemic of Nonchalance,” it may be worth noting the distinctions between the two. For Lase, the critical difference is caring.

“I think you can care about things and be chill about it, or you can care about your relationships and be chill about them,” Lase says. “But I think nonchalantness is a genuine ‘I don’t want to think about this at all.’”

As Lase continues, a sense of chill as something rooted in community begins to emerge. When he’s with his friends, he says, they often talk about finding happiness and peace, and how the dynamics between the Type A (less chill) and Type B (more chill) personalities give everyone a chance to breathe.

“We all sort of can be Type A about certain things,” Lase says. “Sometimes one person being type A about something allows everybody else to be Type B. One person is gonna stress about this, and then the rest of us are gonna chill. And then we sort of trade.”

One of the things Lase takes pride in being “Type A” about among his friends is the planning of their annual spring break trip. Last year, he began planning the group’s trip to Spain seven months in advance.

But when the day came to take off, it was one disaster after another. Flights were delayed, then canceled; friends were split up and reunited and split up again; and rebooked flights were grounded indefinitely — seven months of hard work was rendered useless in less than 24 hours. Any less chill man might have broken. But Lase and his friends leaned on one another to stay positive. They wound up in South Carolina, and while it wasn’t quite Spain, they still had the time of their lives.

“I think we can get through pretty much anything together,” Lase says.

“You tweak about it in the moment, but then you learn from it, and you grow from it, and it’s just like — things become a lot less stressful,” he adds.

Another facet of Lase’s journey to chillness is faith.

“That belief in a higher power sometimes is a good grounding,” he says, gesturing to the silver cross hanging around his neck. “Because then you’re like, ‘Okay, wait, just do what you need to do and then whatever works out is what works out.’”

Over the years, Lase has found that knowing what things are out of your control is often vital to doing your job effectively. When he was Vice President of the Harvard Black Men’s Forum, for example, the added stress of leading and managing crises forced Lase to relax.

“I think that was one of the biggest things I’ve learned by being on board for an org is that you’re gonna stress yourself into the hospital if you keep running through things over and over,” he says. “Whenever things are happening, you control what you can control, and then if you can't control it, you figure something out to do. And it’s not the end of the world.”

But sometimes being chill can also mean taking control of a situation even when it’s scary. Entering college, Lase says he was “very Type A” and “obsessed about everything being aligned in the right way.” He came equipped with a four-year plan and started on the pre-med track with plans to become a doctor.

He was almost done with the requirements by the spring semester of his sophomore year when — after leaving a discussion with poet and English Professor Tracy K. Smith for his Chem 27 section — he realized he wanted something different.

“I was just like, I care way more about psych, and I care way more about psychotherapy, than I do about medicine,” Lase says.

24 hours later, he made the switch.

“Sometimes you’ve got to lead with your feelings, and not overthink things too much,” Lase says, “And I felt it, and I was like, ‘Okay, nah, I’m gonna do what I want to do, and we’ll figure it out.’”

Now, Lase is working on a thesis that combines his love of poetry with psychology, using the art form to create a mental health intervention for Black adults in the U.S. Waiting for the results of his first attempt, Lase stresses the importance of not stressing.

“It’s, again, forced me to be like, ‘Wait, sometimes, things are just out of your control, and you just have to chill,” he says with a breezy laugh. “Like, you literally have to chill or else you’re going to lose your mind.”

While Lase isn’t sure he feels like the most chill senior, he does have some tips for undergraduates looking to ground themselves in the “pressure cooker” that is Harvard.

“Sometimes you just need to go on a walk and romanticize Cambridge and be like, ‘Wow, this is the best thing in my life right now.’ And even though it’s not, and you’re sort of lying to yourself, you do get a boost of serotonin,” he says.

And for soon-to-be grads like himself, he urges them to accept, and even invite, some chaos into their lives, rather than pressuring themselves to settle down and have everything figured out.

“Most of life is gonna be stable and almost boring. You get to your late 30s, early 40s, and it’s like you’re doing the same thing over and over again,” Lase says. “Why not just go and be unstable for a year and find peace in the chaos?”

—Magazine writer Aurora J.B. Sousanis can be reached at [email protected].