Fighting the stress

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Becoming overwhelmed is inevitable in college. No matter how hard you plan ahead or what you do to stay caught up at one point you will be overwhelmed. All my classes are front-loaded so February is like exam month for me. I have endless papers due and a constant headache. Each year I promise next semester will be better and it never is. Now that I am closer to graduation and becoming an adult I am slowly learning to deal with college. Here are some of my favorite tricks to stay ahead and maybe, just maybe, beat being overwhelmed.
Sleep
This seems like such a basic concept, but getting enough sleep helps keep your brain functioning and focused on the tasks at hand. Not getting sleep at night can cause your brain to react as if you were drunk. Who wants to feel drunk while taking an exam? Making sure you balance out your time to get 7-8 hours of sleep each night will help your overall health.
Map things out
I am a very big advocate for paper agendas. I treat mine like it is a bible it holds my entire life inside of it. I write down all my meetings, homework, important tasks and activities. To keep things really organized I use different colored pens for different meanings. My blue pen represents anything I need to do for Alpha Xi Delta, my black pen represents any class work I need to do or exams coming up and my red pen is important meetings or events. If you hate paper planners, I recently got into using Google calendar to send me reminders of everything. I have tasks and events all completely mapped out for each day of the next few months.

Ask for help
I struggle with this tip all the time. I like to get my work done on my own and be proud that I made it through. This can work in some scenarios but 99% of the time we could all use some help. Whether it is going to office hours to work through hard problems or having a friend check your blog for AP style errors, everyone needs help. This semester I have been working on asking for more help and it is starting to make my workload easier to manage.

Now these are only 3 tricks that I use when I start to hit this point in the semester. There are so many ways to handle the stress and confusion that college can bring. Reading articles that discuss handling stress and college can really help you find new ways to conquer your semester.  

Comments

  1. Kortney CottleFebruary 18, 2019 at 8:04 PM

    This is a very useful list of tips for reducing stress in college. I'm sure some of these will come in handy for me during my last semester here!

    ReplyDelete

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