I just had an email exchange with a junior at a local college. Stress is a particular concern with this individual, and they’ve had both major challenges and major successes with stress in recent months. Today, they’re telling me that they are feeling “…a bit under the weather”. My response:
Yeah, used to happen to me a lot, too, in college. Why? Stress, pure and simple. It’s a high stress environment, which is one reason why you’ll be SO happy to be finished with it, eventually! Stress impacts our immune system negatively. Folks in college, where they’re exposed to all known pathogens in the universe (!), must be especially wary of this effect. Sooner or later it’ll “take ya down.”
While working one’s way through the college obstacle course, its wise to take the following recommendations as seriously as you can. I trust their effectiveness highly:
- At any time need to lower your stress level, do a large sigh, in which you release as much muscle tension as possible. At the end of the sigh, sit in a little mental “quiet spot” for a few moments, being as still as possible internally. Practice not-doing for a few moments. Then return SLOWLY to the task at hand. Focus and move on. Repeat often, as this will train you brain to “settle down” more reflexively.
- Sleep is the great healer. It “…knits up the raveled sleeve of care” – that’s how Shakespeare puts it. So, sleep MORE than you think you need. It’s putting money in the bank. Nap as often as you feel the need, and AT LEAST ONCE DAILY, preferably for 90 minutes. New research just out reports that people who do this LEARN MORE, recall more, etc., etc. A great payoff for something that also has distinct intrinsic rewards. I try to do this at least once daily. Lately, I’m getting up to 9.5 hours of sleep daily. I feel WAY better. Think I’m on to something? Care to try it yourself???
- Exercise is the great normalizer, and second only to sleep (and proper eating) as a source of stress relief. By exercise I mean either aerobic (walking briskly or running or swimming, etc.) or resistance (weight room work or equivalent) exercise. Both give you simple tasks to do (“simple” is good), and an opportunity for a mental break. Probably more importantly, both cause fatigue in the large muscles of your body. Fatigued muscles relax, and relaxed muscles actually cause negative feelings in the brain to shut down. That’s stress relief of the most fundamental sort. But wait – there’s more: real exercise induces good, deep, healthy sleep. In college, when I started exercising right after finals, I stopped getting sick (which, until then, was highly likely).
- Mind your mind: Remember your successes. You have many. You’ll have more. They’re what you’re working for. To get them, you MUST have some failures as well. Welcome then. They teach you what does NOT work – essential knowledge, and what you cannot (yet) do. If you’re not failing some of the time, you’re playing it safe or being lazy. So, work to accumulate those necessary failures, and the successes will come as sure as tomorrow’s sunrise.
For years, my own recipe for recovery or self-rescue from periods of intense stress has been very simple and quite fool-proof: eat, exercise, sleep. It simply always works.
Worth a try, eh?
