Stress Relieving Strategies

As a college student, on the PA/Pre-med track I am constantly experiencing stress. I am always trying to balance school, family, volunteer work, friends, and my social life. Most of my courses require a great deal of work inside and outside of class. At times I find myself having difficulty managing my time well while trying to balance all of these things, which in turn creates stress. This week is an even more stressful week because it is the week before Thanksgiving Break and the pressure to have all of my assignments and readings done before break has been creating a strain on me! So, in hopes of being alleviated with all of my workload, I decided to use two of Dr. Blumin’s stress management techniques: A Stress Diagram and A Day at a Time Part of managing stress is controlling your reaction to stressful situations. I let stress to get the best of me when I let my reactions to a stressful situation control me. THINKING ABOUT what causes this stress and what are constructive and destructive reactions to stress and how I manage it are beneficial ways to relieving stress!

For the Stress Diagram Strategy, I listed the sources of stress that I am currently experiencing. I listed 5 spaces and divided the chart into number of sections that corresponds to the number of stresses. Each section represents the relative amount of stress it is in your life.

List of Sources:

1. MAT 194-Math Web Assign 8.1 & 8.2 + Hand-In HW 8.1+8.2 (Due: 11/18)

2. CHE 106-Mastering Chemistry (Due: 11/18)

3. CLS 105 -Stress Management TECH (Due: 11/18)

4. HTW 307-Cultural Competent Volunteer Experience Presentation (on 11/17)

5. Study for upcoming exams and working on projects during Turkey Break

For the strategy A Day at a Time, I noticed that the more organized I am the easier it is for me to control my reactions to stressful situations. I am already accustomed to doing a strategy similar to this one. I usually write a list of things “TO DO” and when they are “DUE” in my planner. However, in the A Day at a Time strategy, I wrote a list everyday with about 4-5 items/tasks that are causing me stress. I wrote the list on a post it and posted it in my planner.

(Lists of Stressors)

Once I completed each of those things that were giving me stress, I checked it off or crossed it out. Trying this method was just as effective as the one I used to use. The delight I receive after crossing each task off is even better!

(CHE 106) Mastering Chemistry Assignment completed!

(WebAssign) completed!

I am both a visual and kinesthetic learner so I found these strategies to be extremely effective because I took the action of writing out the things I needed to do and I was able to visualize the tasks I already completed after crossing them off my lists of stressors.

The first initiative to combating stress is to understand what causes me to stress out. I’ve never really taken the time to actually sit down a think about things that cause me stress. By doing so and following these strategies, this allowed me to think about my constructive and destructive reactions to stress and how I manage them. To minimize stress, I decided to change the way I looked at certain situations and the way I reacted to them.