The Rose Café this past week had some really valuable advice that I would be useful to anyone at Cornell. The main topic of the talk, stress, is a feeling that is ubiquitously complained about at Cornell. We all have so many things that we want to do or accomplish, but in trying to manage those everything we often become overwhelmed leading to this feeling of stress. Furthermore, once the stress has begun, it creates a vicious cycle, where it makes everything more difficult to do and things being harder to do leads to more stress. Now of course there are lots of “strategies” for dealing with stress that everyone has heard over the course of their lifetime, but they are usually pretty vague and either don’t have concrete steps, such as “get more sleep” and “schedule your time,” or are just not possible, such as “reduce your workload.” Where Ms. Sarah Rubenstein-Gillis and Ms. Andrea Gerding’s talk really stood out was in the precise practicality of the suggestions they had for us. One of the ones that really resonated with me was the idea of creating routines not only for getting work done, but also for getting more sleep, as I have read a lot about the power of habits and how effective they can be. For getting work done, for example, they suggested having a pre-work routine to get the mind ready to work as well breaking down or “chunking” work into manageable 20-minute blocks. For sleep they suggested a similar strategy of creating a routine, explaining that the mind needs help knowing when to start shutting down, and this can be accomplished by having a regular sleep schedule and a pre-sleep activity such as reading a book or listening to calming music. Overall I was so convinced by this talk that I tried some of the strategies they suggested the very next day and hope to continue to use them!