10:00 a.m. - Wake up. I want to throw that alarm out of the window.
11:45 a.m. - The parking garage is full and I have 15 minutes to get to my French class. Je deteste le Francais!
2:00 p.m. - I haven’t eaten, I have a test in an hour and a deadline at 5 p.m. Goodbye Einstein’s.
3:30 p.m. - I hate my astronomy class.
5:00 p.m. - I’m stuck in traffic, I’m way past deadline and I haven’t thought about my new blog yet. I guess sleep is out the window tonight. Hello doubleshot espresso.
Whether you’re a freshman in college or whether you’re a grown adult with a spouse and kids, you’re more than likely to experience stress at some point of your life.
Lately, I’ve experienced an excessive amount of stress and I’m only 18 years old. I guess I should expect wrinkles and gray hairs, too.
I’ve never been a "calm" person. In high school, I used to stress out about pretty much everything - ranging from a test or a quiz to who I was sitting with in lunch if one of my friends was sick. Now that I’m in college, I seem to be a lot more stressed out than I used to, and I’m not even taking half the classes that I took in high school, nor am I waking up at 7 a.m. to go to class.
As it turns out, I’m not the only freshman — or student, for that matter — who’s leading the same kind of stressful life as I am. According to a recent study at UCLA in 2006, 30.2 percent of freshmen reported feeling stressed out and overwhelmed by all of their new responsibilities.
So what is going on with us students? College is supposed to be the greatest time of our lives. At the rate I’m going and with the stress that I’m dealing with on a daily basis, college feels like it will be the some of the worst years of my life.
There’s a lot more pressure to do everything 10 times better than in high school: to be a better student and to get a diploma that will hopefully get you somewhere with some kind of career. It seems as though some of us are taking it all a little bit too seriously and forgetting about actually enjoying college.
Sometimes I feel like I can’t even breathe without stressing out. When I don’t have a test that I have to study for, then I’m probably doing homework, and even if I don’t have homework, then I’m probably writing an article that is already past deadline.
Don’t get me wrong, though. I like most of my classes and I like learning the material that I’m taught, and I really do enjoy writing, whether it is for the University Press or for personal reasons. Unfortunately, I just don’t know how to manage my time, which leads me to stress out about everything.
That is the biggest problem with us freshmen: we don’t know how to manage time. Therefore, we’re more prone to stress than more than some upperclassmen who have probably already figured out the system of getting things done on time and not stressing out.
Nobody ever taught me how to manage stress. In high school, most students don’t deal with stress because they’re kids and they don’t really have a lot of things to worry about. But for college students, things are a little bit more realistic and we have to start thinking about our futures and careers. It’s not like we can just get a bad grade on a test, hope to do better on the next one and not really care about it.
Luckily for you, I’ve taken the liberty of jotting down some tips on how to deal with stress from Campus Blues — a Web site that focuses on helping students deal with stress or the "blues" from being away from home for the first time.
1. Exercise — There’s nothing better than going for a run around the park to forget about all your problems.
2. Listen to your favorite music — That’s right, submerge yourself in your favorite song and rock out as hard as you can.
3. Go to a ballgame and scream — Not only are you encouraging your favorite team, but you’re also getting some stress out of your system.
4. Play your favorite video game — It’s Wii time!
5. Make chocolate chip cookies (or just eat the dough) — Chocolate usually fixes everything, or at least it makes you feel a little better.
College is supposed to be fun, so don’t stress out about everything and try to balance your time. Otherwise, you’ll be bald by the time you’re 25 years old. I’m sure you don’t want that.
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3 comments:
What a wonderful blog. You definitely speak the same language that all of us freshman students having the same problems.
But, hey, don´t worry about stress. Sooner or later You´ll see we will beat it.
For the record I´m bold already.
I wish I could say it gets better but it doesn't. If there's one thing in life thats always for sure it's the second you fix one problem another one is right around the corner. We just have to deal with it the best way we can. I agree that exercise is one of the best ways to cope.
It doesn't get better -- you still get the same amount of stress, if not more -- but you learn to deal with it better, either through better time management or apathy. You can guess which one gets you the better GPA, though.
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