what stress's you out?

As a 23 year old University student, I believe it is nearly impossible to have a stress free semester. Stress, is the body's reaction to a change that requires a physical, mental or emotional response. There are many aspects in life that can trigger any of these responses. In the next couple of paragraphs, I will discuss two particular aspects of my life that have generated stress in me and how I attempted to deal with these incidents positively.

School causes stress to just about every student! University, College and High school can all cause high levels of stress. First, I am going to focus on comparing accommodations in High School with accommodations in University. In high school you lived at home, everything was prepared for you, no commitment, no bills and life was great. When I left for school 3 years ago I was in for a real surprise. All of a sudden I had to do everything myself. Dinner was no longer cooked, the house was no longer being cleaned, dishes were not being done, garbage was not being brought out, bills had to be paid. These are only a few of the everyday household chores that while living at home you wouldn’t necessarily think about. Once you start to do these chores on a daily basis, along with everything else you have planned, the days start to feel short and you start to feel like you have less time for yourself. This generates stress. I learned to cope with this by using several different stress control strategies; I would make a list of things to accomplish each day. I had to learn to focus on what I wanted to achieve, not just on what I wanted to do. This common sense strategy is a lot easier said than done. I would prioritize each task in rank of importance. If a task was too large I would divide it up into two smaller ones. In doing all of these things I learned how to manage my time a lot better and more effectively. My stress levels were being controlled and I found myself feeling good about the tasks as they were getting done.

Stress doesn’t always have to come from school though, It can come from sports aswell. It is very easy to become stressed because of the actions of one of your teammates. All it takes is a small mistake or a missed opportunity. I play lacrosse and have been playing lacrosse for most of my life. Through the course of my career I have become stressed because of sports related situations. I will give you an example of something that happened to me this past season. I was new to Trent University; I didn’t know any of the players on the team and was unfamiliar with the campus. I remember the first day of camp like it was yesterday, I was so nervous. When I saw all the players showing up for the first time I felt my stomach turning inside out. As camp proceeded I became more relaxed and started forming friendships with some of the players on the team. Then camp was over and we had started our season. It had been announced that I was a starter on the Trent varsity lacrosse team, which meant I would be starting on the first line each game. Great news right? Well this actually put a lot of stress on me. I was the new kid in town and now I was a starter. This meant I had to produce, my job was to score and if I didn’t I wouldn’t play. You can probably imagine what was going on in my mind. I was afraid to make the wrong shot or the wrong pass, nervous to shoot or take a defender on 1 on 1; afraid to make a mistake. It stressed me out and started to show in my game. I was no longer the same player that I was in the beginning of the season. In my first game I had scored 5 goals, and now stressed, I was finding myself sitting out. I had no answer for my stress, I had no ambition and felt unskilled. It was actually my roommates who helped me to see; it was almost like an intervention. They sat me down and made me spill everything I was feeling towards the team and what had been happening with the level of my play. In my first paragraph I discussed how planning certain strategies was able to help me cope with stress, In this situation it was the friendship of my roommates speaking with me and making me realise that it was all in my head. I shouldn’t have worried about making mistakes and that if I just calmed down, things would work out. I had let my emotions get the best of me.

Stress is something that can occur at any point in time from almost any type of scenario. These two which I presented were situations that affected me most, and where situations where I had learned something valuable. I do believe that if I took what was learned through these events and applied them to this winter term of 2009 that I will be able to control my level of stress and be able to enjoy the semester that much more.