"Stressed" is a key word in the college student vocabulary. You hear it in class, from your friends, walking through campus and essentially anywhere you’re within earshot of 18- to 25-year-olds. It’s typically around this point in the semester that every area of our lives is moving at maximum speed, and with the first round of midterms rapidly approaching, it seems as though stress is all anyone talks about — myself included.
I’ve found through my time here at UF that stress manifests itself in a variety of ways in students. There are those who vent about their source of stress for hours on end but never want to do anything to address it (a habit I’m undeniably guilty of). There’s the type that falls off the face of the Earth until the stress subsides. Or perhaps you’re able to completely deny the existence of stress even as your life seemingly falls to shambles. Yet perhaps the noblest of these variations is the type that sublimates their stress into productivity.
As a fun interjectory vignette, I once drank an espresso at 9 p.m. for no apparent reason, resulting in my highly over-caffeinated mind keeping me up into the wee hours of the night staring at my school calendar and agonizing over all the things I had to do in the next few weeks. It wasn’t until I woke up the next morning with a clear head that I came to the conclusion that, in most cases, stress is useless. I had weeks to prepare for the exams and term papers supposedly looming over my head, and tormenting myself over it wasn’t going to help one bit.
A little bit of stress can be healthy, but it’s once you pass the point of no return that it becomes debilitating. When time spent worrying surpasses time spent working, you know you have a problem. It’s the ruminating — not the exam or paper — that can do the most damage.
As far as dealing with stress is concerned, everyone has their thing. Mine involves covering my room with Post-it notes, detailing what I need to do and when I need to do it. It’s a tad neurotic, but it works. Whether it’s going for a run, meditating or aggressively making lists, any method to combat creeping anxiety will do. It’s letting the anxieties build up on top of each other that’ll drive you off the deep end.
It’s situations where it seems as though your life has become the definition of Murphy’s Law, "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong," that can make you do some crazy things or just shut down altogether. When my laptop decided to spontaneously melt its hard drive three hours before my 20-page term paper was due last semester, I didn’t think I would make it through. But I did. I learned two things that day: Dropbox is an indispensable resource, and life goes on. It’s easy to get tunnel vision and think there’s no way your life could get worse. Honestly, it could and it probably will. But guess what? You’ll make it through that too.
So go take a walk, watch a cute puppy video or pull a Tom Haverford and "treat yo self." As long as you remember one deadline will not be the end of the world, you’re golden. Besides, we’re all in this together as one big, stressed out UF family.
Marisa Papenfuss is a UF English junior. Her column appears on Tuesdays.
