The Rose Café tonight was about stress reduction techniques. Two professional counselors from Gannett gave us tips about how to reduce stress and preform better during the final weeks of school. It was a very timely talk because classes are getting busy, papers are coming due, and exams are around the corner. Luckily, using the tips from Gannett you can try to achieve optimal stress levels.

The talk focused on little things that students can do to help reduce stress and increase performance on exams. Some of the suggestions included breaking up work into “chunks” to make assignments seem more manageable. This is a tip I will try to use for my upcoming papers. This makes sense because three papers of three pages in length seem much more manageable than one nine-page paper.

The speakers also stressed the importance getting a proper amount of sleep. Luckily I have been in the habit of getting a good amount of sleep at night, but I could definitely improve. I was going to start trying to get more sleep tonight, but I have to finish this blog post. Actually, I did not lose any sleep over the writing of this blog post.

During the last five minutes of the talk we did a group meditation session. It was my first time doing meditation and I was impressed with how relaxed I felt afterwards. After only five minutes I felt reenergized and hungry. I’m not sure if the hunger was related to the meditation, but it was noticeable. In fact, I went to eat another dinner following the meditation session.

I also enjoyed seeing college councilors in action because my mother is a psychologist at a university. When I was quite young, I would tag along with my mom when she would talk to groups of college students. I remember going to an event that she organized called “the stress free zone.” It was conducted during final exam week and had all sorts of fun activities for the students. I remember the therapy dogs, stress balling making stations, and more.

My mom has an emergency on call phone for her university so I could relate to the councilor who was nervous about possibly getting an emergency call during the night. Luckily, my mom’s phone doesn’t ring very often.