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DEALING WITH COLLEGE STRESS
College is stressful. No doubt. You’re working your butt off, doing a thousand things outside of class, trying to figure out your major and your career, keep in touch with your friends, stay in shape and probably a hundred other things. Sometimes it can seem like there’s no way that you can handle all of this and keep your sanity. We’ve all been there.
There’s no special sauce formula for handling stress at college, but here are a few suggestions based on our own experiences and, more importantly, our mistakes:
-EXPECT TO BE STRESSED OUT
You might be an ever-competent over-achiever, but you will get stressed out and overwhelmed at least a few times during college. Expect it.
-FIGURE OUT WHY YOU’RE STRESSED OUT
The worst is having this ambiguous heavy weight on your shoulders and not knowing what’s causing it. Something is causing you to stress out. It might be a class where you haven’t done as well as you wanted or expected, a professor who you think is being unfair, a paper that you have to write and just can’t seem to start. Or it might be something more general than that, like not knowing what the heck you should choose as your major, doubting whether you belong in college in the first place, worrying about how you will pay for this expensive education. Or perhaps your stress is more personal—you’re having trouble communicating with a friend, you’ve gained weight and you don’t feel like you can control it, your parents are bugging you.
Force yourself to figure out what’s causing you to stress out—it will make it easier for you to deal with it.
-MAKE ONE SMALL CHANGE RIGHT AWAY
Once you have a better handle on the cause or causes of your stress, do something about it right away. This will be a small step, a tiny change, but it will help you feel in control. If you’re stressing about a paper you can’t write, go to the writing workshop and talk to a tutor. If you’re stressed about your major, write down five fields in which you’re interested and look through the course catalogue for which classes are offered in each field. If you don’t like what you look like in the mirror, go for a run or go to the gym.
Do something right away, no matter how small.
-DISTRACT YOUR MIND
While it’s important to do something about what’s stressing you out, in most cases, you won’t be able to change the situation entirely in a short period of time. After you take the initial step and make one small change, find a way to distract yourself. It’s too easy to get caught up, to get more and more stressed out, and then to stress about being stressed out.
Get your mind off the stress. Do something you love, something that makes you really, really happy. Go to lunch with a friend, read a chapter out of your favorite book, buy that CD you’ve been eyeing for months, take a walk off-campus. Giving your mind a chance to chill out will give you more energy to deal with your stress and you’ll be able to see solutions more clearly.
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