In times of stress...

“Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth, a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.”

-Natalie Goldberg

The million-dollar question here is…what is stress?

It can be defined in many different ways. In biology, stress is any environmental or physical pressure that elicits a response from an organism.

In a simple, 21^st century definition, stress is what you feel when you’re going to take an exam, write and hand-in a paper, interview for a job, looking up your report card, and so much more. Theses are all called stressors. They make you feel stressed.

It’s completely normal to feel stressed. High school, college, and work are supposed to give you stress because that’s part of life. These are important things in life where you want to do well. If you feel like its not going your way then you will start feeling stressed.

An example would be moi (putting my French into action. In reality, I don’t know French that well). I feel stressed in my PSC 121 class because I want to get a perfect in all the quizzes and exams. As you can tell, I am stressed because that is not happening. Another stressor of mine is enrolling into my second semester classes. I can already enroll however until I remove the hold I have I cannot enroll into the classes I want to take. If I take too long to enroll then the classes that I want will all be taken and unavailable.

These are all my stressors right now. And the funny thing is that I am back home, in my beautiful island Puerto Rico, where I want to relax and have fun, and until I don’t solve all this I wont be able to enjoy the wonderful weather here.

However, the important thing to do before solving the problem is to relax and calm the stress down. That way I will be able to solve the problem in three easy steps.

I used two strategies that reduced my stress.

Stress Reduction Plan- THE BEST STRESS RELIEVER EVER!

This is a list of stress reduction activities that appear in Dr. Blumin’s book “It’s All About Choices” in page 267.

All I did was pick some of those activities to make a daily or weekly routine.

For example:

I go dancing. I take a ballet class from 12:30 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. every Sunday. Also, I’ve been working out lately on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Saturdays for an hour. These are under the list of Physical Activity.

Another activity I’ve been doing is that every Friday I organize my room, make it clean, and I get all dolled up. I do my hair, my nails, and maybe put on some make-up. This is part of the Pamper Yourself list.

Right now, because I am in Puerto Rico, I would count this as part of Change Your Environment list. This is a drastic change of weather. Here the sun is always out and 70 degrees or more. On Monday I’m staying for two days at this really nice beach house my family got. This will be my escape week!

Back at college, in my dorm, I’ve developed this thing about listening to music before going to sleep. So, I lie in my bed with my iPod and I listen to relaxing music and that immediately puts me to sleep.

The other strategy I chose!

In order to keep my stress and stressors in control, I tried out the A DAY AT A TIME STRATEGY! I find it most useful!

What I did first was write a list of 5 things that are giving me stress. I was supposed to do it last night but I think you can do it any time of any day. I wrote it down on my notebook in a very neat manner. I got the first thing on my list done already. Tomorrow I will get another stressor done because it’s supposed to be a day at a time hence the title of the strategy J

The last strategy I tried was STRESS DIAGRAM!

This strategy is another list with the stressors and then at the end you put them in a pie chart. The stressor with the most space is the one that gives me a lot of stress and the one with less space give me stress but it comes and goes.

Hope you try out these strategies in order to reduce your stress! Remember its Thanksgiving Break so relax and enjoy the holidays!

Here is where I am right now! Beautiful, sunny, hot, windy day. This is HOME!

Have a great break,

Gil