Say No to Stress

Have you ever felt so overwhelmed and stressed with assignments from courses or other things in your life such as extracurricular activities, family, jobs or other things that you just wanted to scream or just give up? I definitely have. This week in CLS I learned 2 stress reduction strategies that helped me with my stress management skills. Both of these strategies will prove to be beneficial to you as well.

Stress management is a very important topic especially since the semester is almost over and the levels of stress are at there highest at this time for college students. In order to manage your stress successfully you need to control your reactions by not allowing stress overwhelm you. To manage your stress you need to figure out what the root of your stress is. For example are you stressing over a project that you have, money, job or family? After you recognize why you are stress then you need to teach yourself to relax in stressful situations and take a step back to take a deep breath so that you can forget all of your worries. Another useful tip for handling stress is organizing your tasks and responsibilities so that you do not get feel stressed. Now that you know a few tips for managing stress I will tell you about the 2 stress reduction strategies that I used this week which were the Stress Diagram and the Stress Reduction Plan. Both of these strategies helped me to stay calm and focused this week because I have been stressed about a paper I have due in WRT 205 on Monday and an exam I have in CHE 116 on Thursday.

Stress Diagram

The Stress Diagram is an easy strategy to use that only takes a few minutes of time. This strategy helped me to realize the things the things in my life that were causing me the most amount of stress so that I could deal with them. First you list 5 or more sources of stress that are present in your life. Then you draw a circle and divide the circle into the number of sources that you have making a pie chart. The sources that are causing you the most stress should represent a larger potion of the pie chart than the other sources do. For example in my pie chart my argumentative essay takes up a big amount of space because it is due soon and it is stressing me out more my other stress sources are.

The Stress Reduction Plan is simple strategy that involves making a list of stress relieving activities that can become apart of your daily routine in college and later on in your life. After using this strategy I realized that I need to start controlling my stress by taking time to participate in activities that I like.

Stress Reduction Plan

I really enjoyed using the Stress Diagram and the Stress Reduction Plan this week because both of these strategies helped me to create a personal plan to reduce stress in my life. Furthermore I liked these strategies because they were easy to use and are adaptable so they can work for just about anyone whether the person is a college student or professional. I can apply both of these strategies not only to my academic life but also to my everyday life so I will definitely continue to use this strategies and make them a part of my everyday routine. In addition, I liked these strategies because I am a visual learner so by writing down all of my sources of stress and stress reducing activities I was able to see the main things that were causing me stress as well as some things that I could do to get rid of stress. These week I have been working really hard on my last paper for my WRT 205 paper which has been a major source of stress for me but these strategies helped me to take time away from my paper so that I could reduce my stress levels. This worked well for me because when I was extremely stressed out I was unable to think of anything to write. I found that after I took time to do an activity that I wrote down in my Stress Reduction Plan that I was able to relax then I was able to go back to writing my paper and I felt refreshed which made me think of new interesting things to write about.

I hope you will try using either the Stress Diagram or Stress Reduction Plan to help alleviate some of the stress in your daily life so that you can make the most of the last few weeks of the semester. Enjoy the nice weather and Remember that "stress is the trash of modern life - we all generate it but if you don't dispose of it properly, it will pile up and overtake your life" ~Danzae Pace