Stress In College And My Personal Coping Strategies

Stress can be distinguished by positive and negative stress. Positive stress raises motivation and awareness, motivate to deal with challenging situations, bring a sense of urgency or alertness. It is required for survival when facing dangerous situations. Negative stress causes minor conditions, like headaches, insomnia and digestive problems. Stress which excessive, sustained and unrelieved, can bring a harmful influence on health. Stress is a common health problem. College stressors are the sources of stress that I encountered. It is very common among students. Moderate stress can raise the ability to cope with problems, like motivate students and me to put more effort into study. However, excessive stress may have negative emotional and behavioral responses to stressors. I have excessive time pressure since there is heavy coursework in college. I usually do not have enough time to do assignments, and review before examinations. This leads me to having negative emotional response. To manage and prevent excessive stress, I have to be awareness, finding out the reason and how I respond. Then, I have to balance, know the boundary between optimal stress level and overwhelming stress.

Finally, I have to control stress by using means. I have negative emotional response as excessive time pressure. I feel anxious, impatient and tired when assignments are closing to deadline, and I have not adequate sleep time. Afterward, I realized that I had overwhelming stress because I put too much time on studying. Thus, I need to give myself more relaxing time to meet the optimal stress level. Therefore, I use some effective personal coping strategies of managing stress. On behavioural, well time management can reduce and prevent me having excessive time pressure. I mark down all the deadlines of assignments and the days of examinations, set up a timetable of all the things that I have to do and arrange the priorities. Finish least-favorite tasks first, as well as the assignment which is in urgent need or needs a long time to finish, and put the easiest or less important tasks at the end to do, in order to reach peak efficiency. Sometimes, I may postpone the schedule because of unexpected things.

Therefore, I reserve time for the unexpected things and keep track of tasks that I put off, in order to make things manageable and achievable. Also, budget enough time to finish the tasks for giving myself time to relax, entertain and sleep, in order to reach the optimal stress level. On physiological, relaxation and exercise can deal with my negative emotional response. I listen to music because it can relax my mind. Music like slow and quiet classical music, contains soothing power. Besides, I have meditation. Those can help me reduce negative emotion by lead to the relaxation response. Also, I do exercise because regular physical activity can reduce the negative stress effects. Exercise release endorphins, which trigger a positive feeling in body, physically relieve the tension on body and improve the endocrine system. It helps me keeping a healthy body and mind.