Stress...

“Stress is the emotional and physical strain caused by our response to pressure from the outside world.”  (Guy Slowik) Synonyms: Anxiety, Burden Pressure, Worry. Well since we are on the topic of stress or well I am at least let’s look at how it has impacted my college life.  First of all you don’t know stress until college, you may think you do but you don’t. High school had a bit of study here and there a few big assignments and some homework. Stressful Right? Wrong! I figured out that stress is when you think you are ready for everything but you realize you aren’t and well it hits hard.  This last week I discovered stress when tests came around.  Before that I was doing good in college turning all my homework in doing all my assignment and quite frankly I thought I was doing great.  When the studying started the stress set in.  I studied all my notes and for the most it was the first time since I had received them.  The problem with this was the more I studied the more I realized of what I did not know or understand from what I had received.  Something I thought would take a couple of hours turned into 15-20.  I lost a lot of sleep this week staying up till one or two or even three at night trying to get in all my study hours I needed after completing homework, golf practices, and mandatory workouts. It sucked going to sleep feeling like a failure because I knew that I still wasn’t ready every time I finally decided to hit the hay.  It was a wakeup call of sorts.  I hate this insane feeling of stress, the feeling in the bottom of my stomach that makes it turn, the worry in my head that I won’t do well, the burden of more and more study when I don’t have the time.  So I came to a conclusion in this matter.  From now on I’m going to listen to all the advice I have been told.  I’m going to put in 1-2 study hours a day if not more instead of just trying to cram in 12 hours the day before the few days before the test.  This way I won’t kill my sleep patterns and then when test week comes around I won’t have to worry about making time for all the other stuff I need to do such as my practices, my homework, and my workouts.  Stress is no fun and never will be.  Yes I know some stress is good stress but when you are going out of your mind trying to do 4 things at once just say you can stay caught up I think that’s the negative stress.  From now on I will try to be a good student and not stress myself out to much but can’t make any promises because I know how I am LOL. There was a positive out of last week though I can successfully say I did not bomb any of my first college tests. YES!! I plan to keep this up in the future just with a different less stressful approach.