The Dreaded and Feared Stress!

In CLS this week our class studied and learned plenty about the dreaded and feared word of stress. Not only is stress a word most people do not like to hear constantly, but it tends to be a daily feeling and behavior as well. As a college student stress is a typical struggle and extremely common. Personally, I found the entire first year of freshman year highly stressful with the fact that everything is new and paving a new path is always tough to come by at first. I came to Syracuse at the beginning of the year with an open slate and far from home, and I still feel like I am so stressed out all the time trying to juggle academics, friends, clubs, and the simple things that I want to do. Even though I am stressed about the mass amounts that college brings to my life, what stresses me out the most is ironically the fact that I am constantly stressed…making everything worse all the time. Thankfully this week CLS taught me several techniques to use when I am stressed out how to manage my stress.

Most of my stresses come from my academics and the fact that I never know where I am going in life. Considering I am undecided at SU a lot of what I do depends on my grades and figuring out what interests me. Since I applied to Newhouse I get stressed out about my current courses because I want the best grades I can get in order to be accepted into Newhouse. However, at the same time since I am so undecided about my interests and my future I stress out so much about my grades and getting assignments completed to the best of my ability and I reflect if all the stress is really worth it. There are stress management strategies that I used and those were mainly for everyday life as well as courses such as CLS and Psych 205.

This course of CLS has a huge amount of busy work and assignments constantly going on, which at times gets rather stressful, therefore I approached this week with the strategy at a time technique. Towards the beginning of my days I will sit down and think about everything I need to accomplish for that day and even more throughout the week. The technique is called “A Day at a Time” and I create pretty much a to-do list at the beginning of my first class that I have that day. For example, on Monday I created “A Day at a Time” schedule and started off writing down the classes I had that day. After my first class and in between my second class I wrote that I need to go to the library and work on homework. So therefore I wrote class, library, class…then since I have a generous gap from about 2 pm until 6 pm I wrote down all of the assignments I would need to complete for that day and into the week. I wrote down that I needed to finish all of my CLS homework for Wednesday including my journal and extra assignments. I even needed to start thinking about the last project which is the career project and I need to travel to locations in order to gather documentation for that assignment, which I find stressful. I also wrote that I would prepare for my night class on Mondays and study the material. “A Day at a Time” allows me to visually see what I need to get done, and this helps because I am a visual learner. Then, after

I write down my tasks I need to physically do the task, furthermore supporting that I am a kinesthetic learner. Not only does “A Day at a Time” help tremendously with accomplishing schoolwork for the day and week ahead but I always make lists even when I don’t have classes because there are so many things I need to get done in one day that it helps me stay focused and in line. I feel more than productive enough with a technique like this and I recommend this strategy to anyone during anytime.

The second strategy that I used was creating a stress diagram. This strategy is used for more of gathering all the tasks in my life together and being able to see what needs to be juggled and what is most important to me. However, before I discuss how a stress diagram is awesome for every aspect of my current life, I used this for my Psych 205 class. Since Psych 205 requires plenty of assignments I needed to see which assignments were causing me the most stress and what is my first pri

ority and so on. The assignments for that class usually fall on the same day or within the same week. I needed to go out of my way and complete psychology experiments by the end of the class, I have homework assignments due, and then furthermore I have an exam during the week and then a quiz following two days later. On top of that, since the exams are very difficult I like to complete as much extra credit as I can and this puts an even larger load on my plate. I created a circle and figured that the exams are the most important so I divided the largest piece and labeled that “Exam.” Then, the second largest task is the homework assignment followed up by the quiz. The smallest portion was the “SONA” psychology studies because I recently completed the required amount.

The stress diagram is a great way to divide up my life because at first I bullet point what I find most stressful in my life and then I divide up my circle pie chart into categories and which has the highest stress level. The most stressful aspects of my life right now are as follows: my major/academics, a summer job, papers/end of the year projects, and sorority/social activities. I drew my circled stress diagram and the largest portion which takes up half is my major and academics. I am putting this first because as I wrote in the beginning of the blog I am undecided and choosing classes for next Fall is difficult for me because I do not even know if I will still be in Arts and Sciences or Newhouse…therefore my ways of thinking academic wise are always changing. The second largest portion of my diagram is papers and end of the year projects. I am so overloaded with around two papers and two projects that it is stressful to complete everything at the same time. Another large portion within my diagram is a summer job, I am not sure where I will be working yet this summer but I do have ideas so that is a work in progress. About even with my summer job is social activities and sorority business because that takes up substantial time and effort and always doing tasks and activities is stressful and tough.