Last Rose Café, I listened to Sarah Rubenstein-Gillis and Andrea Gerding from Gannett. Their talked focused mainly on stress, how it can affect the body, and how to alleviate some of it. Having three prelims that week meant that at the time, I was definitely feeling the effects of stress. In the beginning, people listed off a few physical things they experience while stressed, and as they rattled each on off, I felt myself feeling then as well. The feeling of chest tightness, fatigue, deep breathing, shoulder ache, racing mind. I thought of everything else I could have been doing and what I could have changed about what had happened earlier in the week.

They then moved on to talk about things we can do to relieve stress. One such thing is having 9 hours of regularly scheduled sleep, something that sounds unachievable with an unpredictable workload day to day. Assignments take longer than expected, meeting pop up, someone has to reschedule. And as I thought there thinking about how far from sleep utopia I had experienced that week, we moved on. Keeping a regularly healthy eating schedule and making time for stress relievers is something that I can definitely work on. Making a routine to signal dedicated time to study and forming habits that aren’t distracting all sound ideal, but there are things that do get in the way of them. When they asked us to visualize overcoming something that causes stress, I could not shake my mental exhaustion and how nice nine hours of sleep sounded.

We were then treated with a brief guided meditation. Rubenstein-Gillis and Gerding talked about how meditation has noticeable, positive, physical effects even when participants don’t believe in its effects. While I tried to focus on various body parts and their movements during the meditation, thoughts of things I had to do were still racing through my mind, but I did feel better afterwards. I will definitely look at trying out the full guided meditations closer to finals when there are more sessions and will attempt to overcome certain stressors on my own.