I believe this talk on stress and handling stress couldn’t have come at a more perfect time for me (and I’m sure some of my peers). At this very moment I’m stressing about my two upcoming prelims, a problems set due Friday, finding an internship, and of course finals. Oh and let us not forget how much laundry piles up. Basically, Cornell is so overwhelming that Rose house felt it was important to bring these women in to figure out how to bring the stress level down and give us techniques on how to handle mounting worries in the next few weeks.

So how do we manage our stress so that it doesn’t bring us into the “red zone” of stress. One example given was to have a pre-work routine that tells your body that it is time to do work. The speaker explains that she will brew herself a cup of tea, watch the water boil, then sit down at her desk and tell herself it is time to work. I personally think this would be a great idea, because I always tell myself ok I’ll do work but let me just check Facebook and then an hour later I haven’t done anything.

Another suggestion was sleep. According to data, people in the college age group need about 9 hours of sleep a night. I can pretty confidently claim that no one on Cornell’s campus is regularly getting 9 hours a night. I try to get as much sleep as I can, but it tends to be 5 hours and then napping 2 hours sometime later in the day.

There are so many remedies to stress, but also so many causes of stress, so I think there is a balance to be found, but no matter what we do, we will be stressed when tests come. I think that is a good thing, however, because it drives us to work and do better.