Stress management
A guide for beginners
David Wesst
It’s April, the time that we at the student peers office call the “bust season.” What makes our office extra popular right about now? Stress.
It’s present in our daily lives, but with final exams and term papers due, the average stress level for a university student skyrockets. Students who are overwhelmed with stress are always welcome to come to the office to talk to one of the peers, and we’ll listen and help in the best way that we can. Nevertheless, some students may feel beyond stressed and have no idea how to handle it, but still feel uncomfortable coming into the office to talk about it.
Responsibilities
Before we delve into the depths of stress management, we are going to need to clarify the definition of a responsibility. A very simple definition of a responsibility is something that you are in charge of. Okay, so I’m being Captain Obvious here, but think about that a little more. What exactly are you responsible for? The easy ones are school work, your job, paying your rent on time and so on. Some that may not have occurred to you immediately are relationships and self-maintenance (like getting enough sleep and eating properly).
Regardless of whether or not they are friendly or intimate, relationships bring an entire set of responsibilities to the table that many people might not even realize exist. Since our friends are always around us, we sometimes take for granted the effort we put into friendships to make them last.
The same goes for self-maintenance. Making sure we eat right and get enough sleep is something that we do naturally, which may cause some to forget that although self-maintenance is natural, it is definitely a responsibility.
Now that we know what a responsibility is, we can learn about the first stress management tool in our toolbox: identifying and analysing the sources of stress.
To do this, we need to identify what our responsibilities are at the current time. If we are responsible for something, it requires time and effort, and if it requires time and effort, then it can be a source of stress. After identifying the sources, it is necessary to analyse them, as you will need to know more about them in order to manage them properly.
Take school work, for example, as that is something that causes stress for every student. The stress of “school work” is far too vague to handle — you need to analyse it and determine what school work needs to be done, how long it is going to take, when it is due and so on. Without analysing a source of stress, you won’t know the details of the cause and will have a much more difficult time managing stress.
Prioritizing
Once everything is identified and analysed, we move onto the next step: prioritizing. This is probably the easiest tool to use, but it is also the most vital.
Prioritizing will help you make decisions more easily. If you happen to be low on funds, have a term paper due the next day and then get a phone call to come in for some overtime at the part-time job, making a decision on the spot won’t be nearly as difficult if everything is already prioritized. It may be more important to take the shift if you have to pay rent and buy your own food, but if you only need spending money, the paper may prove to be a higher priority.
Time management
This brings us to the third tool in the toolbox — time management, which is fairly self-explanatory, since you need to manage the amount of time for each responsibility in advance.
Certain term papers may take longer to complete but be less important than studying for an exam, so you may shave some time off the term paper to study more. In the end, you get a higher grade on the exam but a lower mark on a paper. Hopefully it doesn’t come down to sacrificing certain marks for others, but sometimes that is what needs to be done. That is why the first two steps are vital to successful stress management.
Managing time may seem like the most obvious way to handle stress, but how can you plan your upcoming weeks if you miss a vital detail about your term paper? Suddenly the time you allotted yourself to write the paper is doubled and study time has to be sacrificed instead of that party that you went to last week. Don’t get me wrong, missing the party isn’t good either, but at least you don’t get a bad mark for missing it.
Also, it is important to schedule some downtime for yourself (that’s the self-maintenance responsibility) and some buffer time for the other priorities. If something can go wrong, then it will, so you may as well schedule for the worst case, that way if nothing goes wrong, you just have extra time for something else. And with life the way it is now, that isn’t a bad thing. Lastly, make sure you have a method of keeping track of the schedule you create. Some people can do this through memory, while others (like myself) need to write in an agenda. Honestly, who cares how great your schedule is if you can’t remember it?
Now that we’ve used all of our tools, we are ready for the execution of our stress management plan. You may have planned out the best schedule for yourself, but the odds are that something will change or be added, and thus you will have to change your perfect schedule. In this situation, keep to your priorities. Maybe one of your shifts on a Friday night gets cancelled, so instead of immediately going to a party, you get an early start to the report you were going to start on Saturday. The key is not to follow your task schedule to the last minute, but rather keep it as a guideline. If it works out perfectly, then great, you have nothing to worry about. But it probably won’t, so remember to adapt if necessary.
You now have a set of tools to build and execute a stress management plan. Even with the toolbox for stress management, you may still not be able to handle everything. If that’s the case, there are other options, and student peers can help. Come to the office and talk to one of the peers. It’s confidential, it’s private and it can help. Remember, getting overwhelmed by stress is okay, but letting stress get the best of you can be devastating.
