Being a college student is often lauded as the most fun period of your life. You have freedoms from your parents, you have met new friends and made a long-lasting friend group, and possibly for the first time ever, you are responsible for most facets of your life. However, there is a side of college that isn’t sunshine and puppies: mental fatigue and stress. Being a college student means taking three, four, five, sometimes six or more classes each semester that bring a plethora of homework, studying, and group projects. Dealing with all of this is quite the burden. To help manage this, here are five tips and tricks to help you deal with your stress and mental fatigue.
1. Make a detailed schedule: Being in college can be great! You have tons of clubs and activities that you can join, for many people a new location brings new things to explore and everyone wants time to spend with their friends. Making yourself a detailed calendar or planner can really help you visualize everything that you need to do and want to do.
Providers such as Google and Microsoft Outlook provide a free account for you to deal with your email, your schedule and practically anything you could imagine for your day to day work life. Taking the extra time to schedule studying time for classes, office hours, mealtimes, and more importantly time for yourself can reduce your stress down the road and lead to a more time efficient and relaxed experience.
2. Regularly exercise: Exercise, of any form, is a great way to blow off some of that built up stress. Activities such as running, hiking, biking and dancing, to name a few, have been shown to release endorphins, a chemical that interacts with your body to give you that feel-good feeling. These endorphins have also been shown to improve your sleep and act as natural pain dampeners. It is also a great way to get some social interaction such as going for morning walks with a friend group or doing a virtual at home workout with a few friends.
Along with all of those great benefits, exercise is a phenomenal way to boost self-image. Including exercise with weights and resistance can help you to build muscle and lose body fat, giving you a leaner, more toned physique. Exercising can also have long term benefits as it will improve your cardiovascular health, improve bone strength and increase your energy levels. While we are all staying healthy and practicing social distancing you can still do at home bodyweight exercises and minimal equipment exercises. Yoga, Nike exercise club and Pilates are all great ways to get started!
3. Make time for yourself: While this has already been mentioned before, this is one of the most important things in bolstering your mental health. Deadlines and assignments can really swamp us mentally and make it hard for us to stay high-spirited and energetic. It is all too easy to get lost in the myriad of homework, labs, projects and readings that are piled on top of us.
Taking the time to leave a half an hour a day for yourself can do wonders in clearing your head and relieving some stress. Take some time each day to sit down and do something you love, whether it be reading, exercising, drawing, dancing, or anything in between! Using this time to meditate or journal is a great option as it allows you to unplug and step away from technology and remain in your head.
4. Set Realistic Goals: When starting a project or assignment it is always good to visualize the end goal. However, we can put ourselves in unnecessarily stressful situations by setting our goal too far in the future. Setting small goals that take some work to get to without requiring completion is a great way to get satisfaction and see results at the same time.
For example, instead of looking at a homework assignment as “I must complete this problem set”, break it down more. Tell yourself to complete half of the problems then step away and take a ten-minute break to rest your brain and your eyes. If it is a longer problem or a large project, work on time increments, such as working consistently for an hour then taking a ten to fifteen-minute break. Small victories add up to a big victory in the end!
5. Get enough sleep: Sleep is an incredibly important of our life and can easily be overlooked. Getting the proper amount of sleep ensures that we have the energy and mental capacity to go about our day and stay productive. As many people find out, there is a strong relationship between stress and sleep deprivation. Stress can make it very difficult to sleep at night, and in turn, sleep deprivation can increase our overall stress.
Reducing caffeine intake, setting a regular sleep schedule and eating properly can all help with getting enough sleep. Often times we find ourselves going to bed at different times each night and while sometimes this may be unavoidable, whenever possible try going to bed around the same time and waking up at around the same time every day. Make it a habit of trying to get 7-8 hours of sleep a night, though the amount of sleep someone needs changes person to person.