By: Ekjot Brar
“When it rains, it pours.” It seems like this was a running theme in my life last year. Health issues, crazy midterms, missed midterms, big fat ‘W’s on my transcript, and don’t forget that side order of family drama. I’d dealt with stress before, but never had I broken down so badly. I was away from school and residence life for weeks and was spending a lot of time back home in recovery from some painful medical issues I’d been experiencing. Throughout these medical issues, not only did my body feel out of sync, but my mind was also constantly oscillating between being depressed, and being stressed out to extremes. I didn’t understand why, despite getting copious amounts of rest, antibiotics, and painkillers, I wasn’t feeling any better. And then I finally had to come to the realization that the problem was that too much of my recovery time was being spent wallowing in my own pity. My body felt out of sync because I wasn’t letting myself get better mentally and emotionally. Instead of identifying what was stressing me out and dealing with it, I was just trying to push it all away in hopes that it would somehow disappear.
How do you get out of a slump? The first move in dealing with any stress is often just taking a step back and determining the actual roots of where your stress is coming from. It can often be a build-up of several things that is making you feel stressed, maybe something more than what you initially thought it was on the surface. For me, feeling unwell was not my sole stressor – I was also anxious about missing a substantial amount of school this semester and how it would affect my degree and goals for the next few years. Not confronting what is stressing you out is only going to cause the situation to escalate.
Once you’ve been able to find the source of your stress, you’re ready to slay your dragon. One of the worst things you can do when dealing with stress is not letting it out. You need to get out of your head. Don’t try to distract yourself with movies or TV (trust me, I tried), and don’t let the pressure build up until there’s steam blowing out of your ears. Think about the support system that surrounds your life. Whether you’re stressing out over an exam, your health, or something else that is majorly altering your life, there are always people you can turn to when you feel like it’s too much. I leaned on my family, and also turned to my academic advisors and professors for advice. I always thought that I would just be a number to them, and that in classes of hundreds, I was one person they probably didn’t care about. Don’t make this mistake. My professors and advisors were not only understanding of everything that I was going through, but they genuinely did everything they could to accommodate me in my studies while I was in recovery. Talk to a family member, a friend, a counselor, or even your friendly neighbourhood residence advisor – whoever you feel comfortable confiding in.
These next two steps, I personally think are the most important. Change your attitude/outlook and face the facts that there are some things that you just can’t prevent. Sometimes it’s hard to stay positive when you’re feeling overwhelmed with everything that is going on in your life, but try to incorporate some optimism anytime you feel like this. If you’re in a positive frame of mind, everything will come so much easier. This may sound like a complete cliché, but I stand by it 100%. Not everything is within your control, so sometimes you need to buck up and look at the big picture. Thinking long term helped me put my present life in perspective. Sure my time away meant that I missed a substantial amount of my schoolwork, but maybe dropping a few courses isn’t giving up, maybe it’s re-assessing. Maybe it’s exactly what I needed to be able to focus and prioritize. It might take me an extra year to graduate, but I can use that year to my advantage and grow from it. These are the thoughts I kept circulating through my mind now, and anytime I start to pity myself I think about how I could have it so much worse and just keep moving.
To sum everything up, when you feel like everything is falling apart and you you’re letting your stress eat away at you, “it’s a matter of looking chaos in the eye, and telling it to F-off” (The Ugly Truth, 2009).
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