Stress is Just a Mess

STRESS
The most common problem almost every college student inevitably faces during their college experience.

Being stressed is s serious frustration that people face every day. There are many many factors that adjust themselves to fit a person's life no matter how they life it. For us college students these many factors mostly include school work, but we are at a point in our lives where there is so much else going on that piles up and make our stress symptoms even worse and harder to handle.

So, how do we cope with stress and try to eliminate it?!
There are specific strategies that we can try to adapt to our lives and school school work to help us manage our stress and lower it.

I used a strategy I learned in my CLS to try and handle all my stress in my life and my classes.
It is called the A Day at a Time technique. It doesn't specifically adapt to any particular class, but moreso to my overall well being in my college life instead.
It works like this:

Before going to bed at night on a given day, make yourself a physical list of the top five things that are causing you stress. Take a piece of paper and actually write each thing down.
This way someone who is a Kinesthetic or Visual learner can see exactly what it is that is keeping them stressed out and work so that they can eliminate each factor.
Here is my top five list of stress inhibitors:

I keep this list above my bed so that I can see what I need to take care of before I can comfortably get some relaxation and sleep.
I also made a Pie Graph to map out exactly what percentages were being used from my stress to cause me to feel the way I do on the daily. This way, I could visually see which tasks and events were causing me the majority of my stress:

All it takes were these two (or even one) physical graphic organizers to lay out what I had to do before managing my stress levels.
For two classes that I generally struggle managing my work for, I also mapped out the top three things that caused me the most stress in those classes.
In my CRS class I had: 1. A speech to write about pollution, 2. That speech to learn and get ready to present, and 3. Take a quiz online for my textbook.
I wrote these things down in my assignment notebook and crossed each off as I began to work on them. This helped me become much less stressed about my work as a whole.
In my Religion class I had 1. A response to write on the Islam religion, 2. My research and exploration to do for my final project, and 3. My final project to actually conduct and write.
I haven't finished my project yet, but knowing I have to makes the task itself much less stressful, especially when I can see it visually in my assignment notebook.

I found the A Day at a Time strategy to be very helpful. Being a kinesthetic and visual learner, it was nice seeing each assignment that I had to complete. I knew that if I did each individually, I could eventually learn to tackle my stress one step at a time.
Having stress in someone's life is not fun, but it really is also not healthy. It can be dangerous in time, so dealing with it early can really help you to help lead a healthy and stress-free lifestyle.
I recommend this strategy to anyone, whether in college, highschool, a job, a relationship, or anything stressful in this busy modern life.