If you’re a human being, you’ve experienced stress.
If you’re a student, you probably have a menu of stressors we like to call “deadlines,” with a side dish of part-time work and a serving of interpersonal turmoil for dessert.
Stress helps us accomplish goals, meet deadlines, and develop as people, but we also need strategies to limit its reaches for when it becomes overwhelming.
For me, one of the easiest ways to do this is through mindfulness. Here are two methods of mindfulness I use to reduce stress in my own life.
For the first one, close your eyes and focus on listening to the world around you. To keep that focus, list all the different things you can hear. Are the leaves blowing in the breeze? Do you hear someone walking? Which way are they going? Did a bus drive by? Just giving your mind a break from the things that have been stressing you out can be a small relief in our busy lives.
My other (and my favourite) method is thinking about one thing I want more of when I breathe in and its opposite or whatever is blocking it when I breathe out.
This may sound odd, but it helped me survive a semester of six upper-level classes where I was reduced to eating popcorn for three meals in a row because I didn’t even have the time or money to order in a pizza.
I find the trick to this one to be visualizing myself filling up with something like “focus,” “calm,” or “positivity” and giving these attributes colours I like. “Stress,” “anxiety,” and “annoyance” get colours I don’t like, and I visualize them going out my nose on exhales. If you try this, breathe deep—it has an additional calming effect.
I find this method gets my mind off the school/work/life whirlwind of daily life and lets me just exist. No thoughts about deadlines, tests, work, or friends and family spinning around; just more of the feelings I want more of in life and less of the ones I could do without.
If you’ve never tried mindfulness, give it a go. It only takes a couple minutes and it gets better and easier with time.
There are apps to give a helping hand, and Google can lead you to many other methods.
Who knows? Maybe this will give you the mental space you want and need to have a smoother semester.