Stress, Here We Go Again
Now that the summer is over, our relaxing days in the sun have suddenly been replaced by stressful days in classrooms. During late fall and early winter, the stress is just beginning for most students in the school year. A lot of the time it’s one test a week, and one project every two weeks. As exam season nears, it will hit you even harder—mountains of ISPs and things that aren’t called ISPs (but basically are) and a test practically every other week in every subject. When did this happen?!
First we need to look at the scientific aspect. There’s a good outlook from a woman in a TEDTalks speech who is a psychologist, and has observed some patterns in stress. (TEDTalks, by the way, is an organization that brings in presenters to do live speeches, records them and puts them up on their website). Most people know that stress is a psychological reaction with chemicals in your brain responding to difficult or dangerous situations. This can be either good or bad for you, and sometimes even both. However, what the speaker elaborated on is that stress being beneficial or not is actually based on your conscious reaction to it.
Let’s say you’re feeling worried about making the basketball tryouts. When you feel the symptoms of stress—faster heartbeat and breathing, sweatiness, tension, maybe even blushing – you are actually deciding right then and there whether you are going to use the cortisol, adrenaline, and other chemicals to power through this, or whether these effects will bring you down. So, we actually have a lot of control over our stress. While looking at it as an issue can make it hard to cope, seeing it as helpful can be very helpful in these situations. When we consciously react one way or another, these stress hormones change and either boost or sink both our mental and physical state.
Obviously, this isn’t a cure-all for stress. There are other factors too, and it can be hard to be optimistic you are constantly stressed, or if you’re naturally inclined to be pessimistic about it for hereditary or environmental reasons. But it can be an important first step, According to the psychologist, your stress reaction even affects your heart—as such that ‘bad’ stress makes you more prone to heart attacks, and ‘good’ stress can strengthen your heart.
Some other things we can always do to deal with stress are to prevent it from building up. Changing your courses, schedule, or study habits is a big change, but it can be done in increments. You might drop out of one club that’s too demanding, then join another that calms you down more and is more drop-in. Who you spend your time with can have a big impact too. Stressful friends mean stressful friendships, and it’s the same with relationships. One of the biggest complaints with unsuccessful relationships is that one partner is asking too much of the other. Communicate the issue with your partner and friends, and you may find the social side of your stress shrinking too.
Lastly, it always helps to blow off steam by taking up a new, relaxing hobby. If you’re the busybody type with little time (and I’m sure many of you are), go through your average day in your mind and pick out the points where you’re not doing much because you have no choice. For instance, if you commute by bus and part of the trip you’re always alone, you might want to switch out studying or texting for listening to some more relaxing music, or maybe moving up from the noisy engine in the back of your average TTC bus and meditating in the front. If you are the type that sleeps in class, you may find this method the most useful of all.
Just remember that we all need some stress in our lives, it’s just the over-drive times that we need to deal with. If you take baby-steps, you’ll soon find yourself in a very ‘zen’ place.
Hope this helped!