iStress Management

In this week's lecture, we talked about stress, how we can reduce the effect of stress, the strategies we can use to minimize or eliminate the factors that cause us to feel the stress. We use the term 'stress' so much these days due to the more demanding society and workload we get as a college students. It became part of our lives and under constant stress, we need to fight back with efficient strategies in order to stay focused and really do our best. Because I had such a stressful first semester, my reaction was to go little easy on second semester with course selection. This resulted in another cause for stress, which was that I need to take those courses I avoided anyway. I always thought there is one magical method to take away all my stress away, but it turns out life is not that easy. So I decided to get along with this bad friend called stress. Because he is a bad friend, I thought it would be a good idea to bring along few good friends to balance things out.

These two good friend's names are 'Stress Diagram', and 'Five-Minute Escape'.

I used these two strategies to all of my academic courses such as NSD 225 and CLS 105, but not only those two specific courses, but my entire career academic life in college as well.

The Stress Diagram is great because this strategy help you to prioritize the factors that causes you to feel stress out and visualize those factors to help you identify the problems. To make things happen, first you need a create a list which contains all the factors that cause you to stress. For me, the biggest causes for stress are my school GPA, transferring my major to the other, whether I should take summer courses in Syracuse or not, my friends, and relationship with this girl. After you create the list, make a pie chart to fit these factors in. In the pie chart, divide the list of stress sources according to their level of stress. For example, because I worry about my GPA most, I gave GPA stress factor the most space in pie chart to represent the level of stress level I get from it. Now not only you can identify the problems, but also visualize the causes for stress and their priorities. Because my biggest causes for stress is my GPA, it's related to my academic courses like NSD 225 and CLS 105. For that, I can try to study harder and get better grades to alleviate my stress level. Even though, diagram looks very simple, but it's effective because of it's visual elements and because I'm a visual learner as well. This strategy allows students to prioritize their time on.

Stress Diagram

Another strategy that I've used to reduce my stress and help me get good grades on NSD 225 and CLS 105 is Five-Minute Escape. This stress management strategy helps you to relieve your stress effectively in a short amount of time. It's like a zen but really simple and easy to follow. It's one of those strategy you will use often anytime, anywhere. The directions are pretty specific. You close your eyes, and take five slow, deep breaths. Then rotate your shoulders in a circular motion, first backwards five time, then five times to forward. Slowly massage your temples in a circular motion with your fingers for 30 seconds. For this step, I prefer longer period of time because it feels so good. So I made it a minute long instead. After that, you massage your jaw, concentrating on the hinges. Try to force yourself to unclench your jaws when you do this. Then slowly drop your chin onto your chest five times. Move your right ear to your right shoulder five times. Then switch the side, trying to touch your left ear to your left shoulder five times. Finally, move your chin to the left and touch our left shoulder. Switch to the right. Go back and forth five times. Cross your arms in front of you and reach around to your shoulders. Using your thumbs and index fingers, knead your trapezius muscle for about 30 seconds. Finally, take five slow, deep breaths and open your eyes. These directions are directly from textbook and you can read it for yourself in detail in the book. It's especially effective because it doesn't take that much time and you can do this anywhere in very short amount of time. The first time I tried this, I was blown away by the effectiveness of the practice. My headache almost went away. But mind you, it's only effective if you do this once or twice a day. If you are trying to use this to reduce your stress level every 10 minutes, it won't work. So use it wisely when you really need it. I've use this strategy in my NSD 225 course after long lecture and it definitely worked for me. Try once, you will get the idea.

Overall, both of these stress management strategy worked out great for NSD 225 and CLS 105 courses. I can use Stress Diagram to identify my stress factors and use the relaxingFive Minute Escape to alleviate my little stress here and there. I mean they works great to just manage my overall stress level in college. I have less than a month in my first ever freshmen year in Syracuse and hope to stay focused until the end.

Because of these great strategies, I'm confident I will do just fine.