Students work to combat stress with healthy outlets on campus
In order to keep calm and maintain a stress-free lifestyle, Celedonia senior Micalah Brennan chooses running, reading and socializing as her outlets. In high school, she participated in sports and other extra curricular activities. Now she uses other methods of combating stress on a tight schedule.
Running and reading aside, Brennan finds the most important way to balance her time is to keep a good state of mind.
“It really helps to put things into perspective,” Brennan said. She explained that if you turn in one homework assignment late, it won’t really matter in the long run.
Everyone manages stress in their own way, and when adjusting to a college lifestyle, CMU students can attest that it is crucial to find an effective outlet to relieve stress and maintain a healthy mindset.
Department of Psychology faculty Kimberly O'Brien offers these tips for students coping with stress.
1. Avoid stressful thinking. People who ruminate or catastrophize have worse stress. Make it a point to say “it’s no big deal” whenever possible.
2. Sleep on it. Sleep allows the body to retain only the most important things in your thoughts, and improves problem solving skills.
3. Identify the real reasons for your stress. Sometimes identifying “why” something causes you stress is pivotal in being able to leave that stress behind.
4. Don’t take it personally. When in doubt, it is natural human behavior to “fill in the blanks,” but how we choose to do so can worsen distress.
5. Avoid micromanaging and relinquish control. Try to remind yourself, “when is the last time something didn’t work out” and was it because you failed to micromanage? Probably not.
Working out is a popular choice to release stress and proves to be effective for students.
Hudsonville sophomore Nicole Bouwma plays basketball when she needs a break from schoolwork.
“I think its purpose now is to relieve stress,” Bouwma explained. “Before I played because I just liked to play basketball, and now I feel like I have to implement it in order to control my stress.”
She finds being active and other forms of exercise helpful as well.
“For college students, there’s a lot of sitting around. It’s good to get up and move," Bouwma said. "It actually makes me feel less tired to do."
Illinois freshman Jacob Callihan works out to relieve stress as well, and has actually started a trend on his floor that helps motivate everyone to exercise.
“You see more and more people doing it and I feel like it has brought our floor closer in that way too," Callihan said.
Figuring out how to schedule and manage time was the hardest adjustment Callihan had to make when coming to college. He found that by structuring his day around a strict workout plan and building a community of people in his hall to workout together, he was able to alleviate stress.
Instead of going to the SAC to workout, Dearborn junior Jeree Spicer is a member of the Rampage dance troupe, eliminating her stress through a mixture of hip-hop, lyrical and ballet.
Spicer finds her stress level in college to be relatively similar to how it was in high school, and has adopted the mindset that things are ‘only as stressful as you make them.’
