Caroline Schaeffer
Writer
It’s that time of year again, the time when every one of your teachers has decided to give you a gargantuan midterm worth at least 45 percent of your grade, and they all decided to do it on the same day. On top of that, clubs, projects, papers and life in general piles up on your already loaded schedule and it feels as though your workload is about to literally crush you. At a school with as demanding a curriculum as the University’s, you’d be hard-pressed to find a student not feeling the pressure every now and again but, hakuna matata, students, stress doesn’t have to kill you. There are some easy ways to avoid that anxiety overdrive.
It may seem completely counterproductive to getting your work done but you have to remember to take a break and relax. Studying for eight hours straight will drive you insane and basically turn you into a zombie. Remember to take at least an hour off if you’re having a hard-core cram session, and do something you find enjoyable. Watch an hour of mindless TV, Facebook stalk the living daylights out of your friends or just hang out with a friend for a little. If you give yourself a little leeway and enjoy some you-time, when it’s time to go back to studying, you’ll feel refreshed and ready for round two.
If it’s just one of those weeks when everything and anything is due, sometimes you’ve just got to make all the little moments you have to yourself count. Take a long hot shower, nap for an extra 20 minutes or if you’re really ambitious, crank it out at the gym for an hour and sweat out the stress. Better yet, take an hour out of your day to take one of the University’s gym classes. I guarantee you won’t be thinking about that term paper during an hour of breaking down the beat in Zumba or contorting your body in yoga. Sometimes, you just need to let loose to lose the stress.
If you’re trying to alleviate stress in your life you have to do something that doesn’t cause you stress. It sounds simple, but a lot of us forget to take a break when the pressure is on. Just give yourself a little personal time, and do whatever makes you forget about that English paper or Econ test for an hour. By the time you’re done, you’ll be ready to crush whatever anxiety stands in your way.