Features: Eliminating Stress

A Christmas Tradition…

It’s a tradition as deeply ingrained as overdosing on eggnog or decorating the tree: college students home for the holidays getting into fights with their parents about school. There are uncountably many different ways for these fights to be kindled, but once raging they fall into one of two predictable paths: the always popular “you don’t understand how hard I study” theme and the well-worn classic “I know everything and you’re hopelessly naive.”

This post, in the spirit of the season, teaches you how to avoid such brawls. Below are three simple pieces of advice. Give them a read now and the vacation days ahead might just remain merry.

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College Woes

A Swarthmore student recently clued me into an interesting fact about life at this competitive school:

The whole predominant atmosphere here is stress, stress, and more stress. We even have a term called misery poker.

Naturally, I asked her for an explanation. She responded with the following sample dialog:

“I have two midterms, a 10 page paper, and I’m headed to a conference next weekend,” says the stressed student

“Oh yeah?,” replies his bleary-eyed friend. “I’ll raise you all that, and add a lab report”

The winner is the student whose life sucks the most.

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Tasting Porridge…

The hardest part of building a quality student lifestyle is figuring out how much stuff you should be doing. Some students are clearly slackers. And some are clearly grinds. But for everyone else, especially those trying to follow the Zen Valedictorian Philosophy, a nagging question lurks: how do I know if I’m doing the right amount of classes and activities?

In this post I want to discuss a simple approach for designing an optimal workload. I call it the Goldilocks Strategy for obvious reasons: we’re looking for the proverbial work porridge that tastes just right.

To understand this strategy, however, we must first touch base with the reality of how our workload interacts with both our impressiveness and our stress…

The Work Saturation Point

Consider the graph at the top of this post. I’ve plotted two lines. The blue line represents your impressiveness and the red line represents your stress level. As you move from left to right, this represents an increase in your workload (both academic and extracurricular). Therefore, the graph shows how both your impressiveness and stress change as your workload increases.

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October Madness

For most students, the end of October marks the halfway point of the fall semester. Midterm exams loom. The workload has reached it’s full intensity. Deadlines are overlapping. Stress levels are starting their traditional climb from manageable to insane.

From my experience, you have two options at this point. First, you can give into to the chaos and limp through the rest of semester always behind on work, constantly stressed, suffering through one all-nighter after another while you struggle to keep the wheels on the proverbial bus.

The second option, however, is that you give the middle finger to the chaos: fight back the work onslaught and regain control.

Not surprisingly, this post describes a simple system to help achieve the latter option.

The Mid-Semester Dash

Here’s a simple system to stay in control as your semester progresses:

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