Thursday, September 15, 2011

An Unfortunate (hopefully helpful) Change

Alright, so it's been a rough couple of days. The week started off with a trip to the ER for one of my roommates (she's fine, thankfully), then a test the following day, some major studying and homework on my birthday (yesterday), and some realizations.

One realization in particular: I stress wayyyy too much about wayyyy too much (shocker, right?). I have this headache that I've had since Labor Day. That's over a week ago! I'm going to say it's due to stress, being that it basically started up right around the time that classes started to get difficult and overwhelming. I am a stresser. I'm a worry wart and I think over way too many things. I get an idea in my head of something that's stressing me out and it just festers there until whatever it is I'm stressing about it over. I'm perfectly fine during the day - it's at night when the stressing takes over.

We all have things that stress us out; that's just life. But for some of us, stressing is a big part of every day and that's just not okay. Therefore, we need to work to maybe not get rid of, but alleviate that stress a bit. Some things that I  try to de-stress:

1. Work out. This always makes me feel so much better. Working out is sort of my "me" time; I literally don't think about anything when I'm at the gym.
2. Listen to music. This is a big one for me. I could be in the worst mood and then put on a feel-good song and I'm instantly brought back to normalcy.
3. Talk to someone you love. I think this one is really important. It's really important to have a good, stable support group. One or two people who you can call at any hour of the day or night and they'll listen to you and be more than willing to help you. The people who seem to put you before themselves and really care about you and what you're going through, even if it's the smallest thing in the world.
4. Take a cat nap. It's always good to remove youself from the situation for 15-20 minutes or so and completely shut yourself out from any others stresses. Cat naps are great. Even if you have a ton of things to do, 15 minutes won't do all that much in the long run. Sometimes you need to just chill out.

Here it is. The new unfortunate change that I'm about to implement in my life. Remember how I am not supposed to have coffee anymore but I still do anyway? Well...


I am going to try to eliminate coffee from my diet. Yup. I said it. My love affair with coffee must come to an end. I was reading about things that may heighten peoples' stress, and it said in order to decrease anxiety and stress, it may be a good idea to stay away from your daily dose of heaven in a cup.

So, being that I'm already supposed to steer clear of it, I've decided to really kick it up a notch and see how that helps me. Today is Day 2. I'll make a daily counter in the top right corner of the post!

I'm not sure if I posted this song before, but it's really relevant today, so here it is:

Is stress a problem for you? What do you do to de-stress?

2 comments:

  1. I suggest tea (mild black first, then switch to green) to wean yourself off the coffee, otherwise your headache is just going to get worse as you go through caffeine withdrawal. Also, green tea is just really good for you- lots of antioxidants and things.

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  2. That's a great idea! I don't know why I didn't think of that. It makes so much sense. I plan to fill coffee's void with green tea. You're right - it is veryyy good for you!

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