How to cope with STRESS

"Stress is the body's reaction to a change that requires a physical, mental or emotional adjustment or response." I seem to never take time to find a way to escape from my stress; rather I just try and cope with all the pressure I have from my school work. During the CLS workshop, one of the T.A.’s talked about some strategies to us for students to help deal with stressful issues that a college undergrad will regularly go through. For me, I always tend to always have sporadic thoughts going on in my head usually dealing with the topics of school, social schemes, friends/family and sport. Its seems as if I am never able to escape the random thoughts that always spin around in my head which in turn, ALWAYS makes me stressed. Talking in workshop about stress reliever strategies really helped me reevaluate how I should control myself when the “going gets tough.”

The two strategies I decided on using were, Five-Minute Escape and Stress Diagram. I decided on both of these because with the stress diagram, I am able to rank all of my stressors, explain why they make me stressed and what about them makes me so stressed. Ranking my stressors and explaining the reasons for their effectiveness on my stress levels shows that I need to take more time in making these topics a priority and to try and find effective ways in helping them lower my stress. But, there was a downside to ranking my stressors, when I ranked what made me so stressed it seemed to keep my stress levels up instead of looking at them and trying to make a way to fix it so I won’t be so anxious when dealing with these topics. I took the approach on once again reevaluating my stressors and WRITING OUT why they make me so anxious and stressed. Once I did that, I had a better attitude on being able to deal with the pressure of school and other things in my life because I wrote down why it made me stressed. I then was able to talk about what makes me stressed which helped because I was then able to get feedback on other ways to approach stress. With that being said, the second strategy that I used that was very beneficial to dealing with stress was the five-minute escape. Instead of stretching, closing my eyes and rubbing my temples I found that what helps relieve stress for me is watching the news. I usually will take a little over five minutes probably ten to read over a daily article from CNN or The New York Times and usually that will help me get my mind off whatever that was making me stressed and then go back and do my work or whatever productive thing I was working on. Normally that always does the trick for me and I will always learn something new also.

An important goal for me is to have a “balanced life,” with school, friends and how I use my time. Managing stress is all about taking charge of you, your thoughts and emotions. LET’S TAKE CHARGE!