I was surprised by how much I learned at this Rose Cafe event! It seemed like a simple talk about how to decrease your stress and how to take care of yourself, but I truly learned about lifestyle choices that I want to implement in my life. And I realized that Cornell students don’t value their health as much as they’re supposed to!

We had a discussion about how difficult it was for some people to start large projects or homework, and Ms. Gerding had two suggestions for how to approach this: (1) Have a pre-work routine of about 15-20 minutes that you do every time before you start working, and (2) Breaking up the large projects/assignments into chunks. In regards to (1), I thought it was helpful because if we condition our brains to get into working mode, we’ll be much more efficient than trying to immediately sink from a relaxed mode into a deep-focus mode, which is usually what I try to do. With that being said, I think that (2) is very simple but I never attempt to do it. I try to do all the smaller assignments first, and then leave the large assignments for the last minute, mostly because I find it extremely hard for me to start an assignment that’s HUGE. But what Ms. Gerding said was to break the large assignments into chunks so that our brain gets a sense of accomplishment after finishing one “chunk” of the assignment. Although I think it could really work out for some people, sometimes I feel like I’ll list out so many “to do’s” and I never really get to any of them, and seeing that many “to-do’s” left makes me feel the opposite of accomplished. But I will definitely try doing this anyway!

Finally, we ended the Cafe event with some meditation. I’ve actually thought about trying meditation before, but the idea of it seemed very spiritual to me, and I felt like I didn’t possess enough spirituality for it to help me. Ms. Gerding actually talked about an experiment done on teenage girls who participated in a guided meditation, but didn’t feel like it did anything for them. However, studies showed that there was a decrease in cortisol from saliva samples before and after the meditation, which means that even if your mind is wandering during a meditation, the activity itself can calm you! I didn’t really believe it until the meditation ended and I felt much looser and less tense, and I’m convinced that it will help me during finals week!