Final 20 Time Reflection

Gillian’s:

For our 20 Time project never really had a final product for our discoveries and self experiment but we still had a lot to take away from it. You can watch our Ted Talk about our project here to see everything about it. Our experiment of sorts was to observe our own lives to find what aspects of a student's life cause the most stress and how our extracurriculars play into our stress levels. After we started this, it became a very large part of how we reduced stress because of how we were recording our feeling by ranting, that release relieved a huge amount of stress from our lives. On this blog post you can see our realization of how we were noticing pattern in our lives and when our project became what it is.

Making a Ted talk for the project was actually pretty fun to do because I got to work with Amelia, and I knew that we could rely on each other to carry the weight needed to have a good Ted Talk. Because we rehearsed the talk a few times it went quite well even if I forgot a few things since I get a little nervous. After re-watching our talk it was better than I thought but definitely was not as professional and comfortable as the real Ted Talks scientists do. I feel like we did pretty well because we payed attention to the rubric carefully even if we did forget a few things and did exactly what was required.

I completely plan on continuing to record my feelings to reduce my stress because it really did help. I hope other teachers can put something like this into their classes to get student more passionate.

Amelia’s:

As you may know, I've been doing a semester-long project about stress. I made a new blog about it, where I explained what we would be doing and reported our progress on a bi-weekly basis. It was really fun to see our progress and to see what we discovered. At the end of the year, we concluded this project with a Ted Talk presentation, which was actually our final "test" for this class. If you want to see it, here’s the link.

Overall, I think our Ted Talk went really well. Our presentation had to be within 4-5 minutes, and we almost nailed that. (I think we went a few seconds over the limit). We had rehearsed well enough so that we had our presentation memorized, which made everything run really smoothly and made us look really professional. I liked working with my friend; we're really close, and it really helped to have someone who knew what I was thinking contribute to this project. Time management was also pretty easy for us, especially since this project was pretty laid back. Honestly, I would give me and my partner the same grade that our teacher gave, since I feel that he graded us very fairly. Also, I think we did really well.

What I took away from this project was actually a surprise to me. Throughout the semester, me and my partner had written down our feelings at the end of every week to monitor our stress levels. It turned out to be a stress-reliever in itself. Basically, since it was a really easy and good reliever of stress, I am going to continue this in the future (and suggest you do, too). We hadn't actually planned this when we started our project, but it was really nice to discover this helpful tool for the future. This project was a really fun thing to do over the semester, and I'm glad that I found this technique!

Gillian's 20 Time Reflection

I am not one that likes to talk about my feeling but for this project I made myself pretty much rant about my feeling and my life and somehow it was really nice and productive. Our project was intended to discover the main cause of student stress and then figure out how important extracurriculars are in student lives in relation to stress. We wanted to focus on stress because as students at Saratoga High and juniors specifically, we saw how high the stress level was for ourselves and our peers and wanted to find out more about that and what factors into it. By doing this project it really made me realize what specific events cause that stress students feel and what types of things I do to control it that I wasn’t aware I was doing until I started to pay attention to my life and my habits. Honestly I don’t know if we had a true goal that is specific and could be achieved other than discovering truths behind stressors and how our activities outside of academia played into the stress process but that is something that cannot really be shown in a presentation since it is different for every person, there were obvious patterns sure, but we can never have an exact answer to that question.

This really did start as a school project but then when we starting realizing that just doing this project every week actually reduced our stress, it became pretty important to our lives. The project as a whole went well even though it did not go fully as intended as I said before. Doing this study of myself and other students brought validity to what we have learned about stress and health in general because I saw the affects the different stresses had on my mind and body. I saw how from day to day my feelings fluctuated fully dependent on the amount of stress I went through in those days or what I had coming up so I utilized this project to understand how to deal with the stress and control it a little bit. If I could redo this project I probably would have chosen something that was more proactive so that it wasn’t purely research and working on a computer, but I definitely don’t regret choosing this topic because it greatly improved my mental health and understanding of student life by just becoming aware of it. I hope to find a way through this TED talk or sharing our findings with students and adults alike, to show how important having those outlets is and that if a student wants to do well in their classes and be mentally healthy, they should find something outside of school to focus on and be passionate about so that they aren’t overwhelmed by school as many students at Saratoga are.

Amelia's Reflection

As we are wrapping up this school year, we have to start to wrap up our 20 time projects.

I really enjoyed this project. Me and Gillian were both intrigued by the idea of student stress, and, as we are students ourselves, we hoped that we could find ways to reduce this stress and even help others to do that as well. Since we were both in a unique extracurricular that we love, we decided to see if that would have an influence on our stress.

It was really hard for us to go through and find out what stresses us out (obviously pretty mentally challenging). We got through it though, and found some really helpful tips on how to control your emotions. You just have to tough it out sometimes. We also had some struggle getting our information out to our school. We posted in school-wide Facebook groups, but still didn’t get the response we needed. We did get a response, and the response was really helpful.

I learned a lot about how stress works in my life. The amount of stress often depends on when I have color guard and how heavy my homework load is. This project helped me get control of my stress when it was overwhelming. By taking a minute out of my day (nothing compared to 20% of a week) to just breathe and take a chill pill, I became a calmer and more organized person. Many studies, like this one, have proven that mindfulness reduces stress and thus benefits the body. We had been doing this in class every day, but our teacher has stopped recently (but I don’t know why). I actually really helped me keep control of my emotions and concentrate on important things. Just now, I realized that “keeping control of my emotions” is basically the Star Trek practice “kolinahr” (used by the logic-loving Vulcan Spock). (shh I know I’m a nerd)

Starting this project, we kept a journal to record our feelings and stress levels as they correspond to our other activities. As time went on, this journal of feelings turned into a place where we could relive our feelings. Accidentally, we had created a ranting journal that actually helped us relieve our stress as we were writing about it. Every week I found myself waiting to write about the crap that went down at school and how much the color guard instructor was being impatient and annoying. I’m really glad of this accident, and I’m going to start keeping a real journal next to my bed for writing about my feelings at the end of every day. We can definitely expand on this project throughout our lives, and see how our grown-up work lives affect our lives.

We have also released a survey about stress to our junior class at our school. It was really interesting to see the results. We had a scale of hours spent studying and hours used for extracurriculars, and some people had over 40 hours per week of studying. The corresponding question, “Does this cause a lot of stress?” was often answered yes. It made me so sad to see how much stress there is at this school. However, many people, who were in some extracurriculars, had written that they enjoyed being in them and that they had reduced stress! We were happy that we had relevant support of what we had been studying.

In our research, we discovered that “student stress” and “extracurriculars” were common themes together. The typical scenario is that the parents take their kids out of their sports or clubs so that they can study more (causing more stress, since the time away from studying to collect oneself and to do something they love actually relieves stress).

I learned so much about myself and others and stress through this project. I wouldn’t do anything differently, since that would have caused us to have a different result (maybe not this one, the best one, in my opinion).

Our next steps is to collect our knowledge we learned from this project and spread it around so everyone can benefit. We hoped that through this project we could get rid of the idea that extracurriculars are, well, extra and unnecessary. We need them to reduce stress by doing something you love. Overall, we just want a happier and better environment in the school (and the world).

~Amelia

Absence Makes the Stress Grow Stronger

From having spring break and at least Gillian having a pretty relaxed week of school last week, we realized that taking time to not do any school work and focusing on relaxing does wonders for your mental health. We are a lot more chill than we were before because of the ways we found to relax. The stress relieving techniques, like using our journal type thing to pretty much go on a rant about our feelings, have actually really helped us in dealing with our daily struggles. Also, Gillian found out that the key to success is extra sleep (especially if you’re currently in high school and are stressed about everything). It works wonders if you just take a minute out of your day to just chill out. It’s like that old anger-management technique, where you count down from ten and think before you fly off the handle. Plus, as a result of our lives being more chill, we’ve discovered that our schedules are more balanced. Even with the impending doom of more color guard practices, we’ve been surprised by the lack of craziness in our lives. Alternatively, we discovered that not having guard turns out attention to school, making us stress about it more and our lives harder. And we don’t have an outlet to destress.

We now want to see if other people have this same kind of feeling with their activities so we made a survey to see what other have to say about their stress. It would mean a lot to us if you would fill it out and it would help us and others to see if this is something we should make aware to people so they know that having something to do other than academics is healthy both mentally and physically.

So far, this project has been really fun and eye-opening. We haven’t had really any setbacks thankfully.

Our remaining goals are to spread awareness about student stress. We’d really appreciate it if you’d fill out our survey and spread the word, as it would help us achieve this goal.

The Effects of Stress on Our Bodies

This week and last week have been quite stressful for the both of us. It is a full break from color guard, which is extremely stressful (but also relaxing because yay free time) because we need to practice in order to stay rehearsed on our parts. Also, we’ve been playing catch-up from the two days we missed from school because of our color guard trip to Las Vegas. ALSO also, this week is the last week before spring break, so all of our teachers have been piling on tests and quizzes and homework so that we don’t have to do it over the break (or forget what we’ve been learning in class).

We have also been doing a bit of research on the effects of stress on the body. There’s a really great video on YouTube by ASAP Science: Click for video

This video explains how daily stress, like tests or taxes, can trigger the same hormonal response as getting chased by a bear. The only problem is that we don’t know how to stop stressing out, so we get a higher blood pressure, pulse, and blood sugar, which can cause things like heart disease or diabetes. It goes into pretty good detail, and helps show how important your parents and friends are in keeping stress under control.

Not all stress is bad, actually. Your body is built to respond to stimuli, telling it when to stop releasing hormones and when to start again. For example, being near your family tells your brain to stop releasing the stress hormone cortisol, while stressful situations tell it to release it. It’s nice to have someone help you and support you through rough times. Also, when you’re being cornered by a bear, stress helps you have that fight-or-flight response, and makes you able to think quickly and survive in bad situations.

Our lives have kind of stayed at a pretty constant level of stress, even with new stressors and events. We know our bodies, and know what works for us, and that’s awesome. You should try to figure out what works for you so you can help yourself. But the most important thing, our goal in this project, is to help everyone with their stress and help find the role of extracurriculars in stress. So, in order to make this helpful for everyone, we’ve made a survey to see what you do for an extracurricular and how it affects your stress. We are both in the same sport, and are pretty biased towards it, so we want to know how other sports or activities affect your stress. We’d really appreciate your feedback, as it will help us in our quest for everyone’s peace of mind!

Click here for the survey! (send it to your friends too and other schools especially)

Noticing Patterns

These past two weeks have been very stressful so we really have had to use those stress reliefs techniques we learned to not get too overwhelmed. Our project is to see the roles that extracurriculars play in our stress levels, and right now those are causing a large amount of our stress, but not the unhealthy kind we notice we get from schoolwork, a more productive type of stress that motivates us to do well. Noticing that different type of stress just highlights what we have learned in our health unit about how some stress is good for you but it is the chronic stress, like grades and school, that take a harmful toll on the body.

What have we learned about ourselves? Well that means individual responses from both of us.

Gillian:

I have learned in this time that having a focus for the stress like practicing color guard and getting better, can be easily dissipated through doing color guard and knowing I am making progress. If practicing becomes stressful, taking a break and going at it later rather than overworking it does do wonderful things for the anxiety and also outcome. With school it's much harder to dissipate that stress because you can't be relaxed until you have taken the test, and found out your grade, and a lot of the time the grade causes even more stress rather than relaxation. This chronic stress has taken a noticeable physical and emotion toll that is not healthy for a high school student. I plan on finding a way to minimize that school stress for the rest of the year.

Amelia:

I’ve learned so far that if i just take it one day at a time and stay in the moment—something our color guard instructors tell us every day—to stay calm and perform well, and don’t worry about what might come next or why I messed up a few seconds before. Also, this week has been very stressful because we have to go to Las Vegas for a competition. I figured out that planning stuff out on a to-do list helps me calm down and feel accomplished. It also reduces my stress because 1) I like scribbling things out and 2) I have fewer things to worry about. If you’re someone who has a lot of things going on in their life right now, I highly suggest making a schedule or calendar of some sort to organize your life. So, color guard has really helped me de-stress my life, which shows that at least for me so far, extracurriculars are beneficial to my stress levels. I’m going to continue with these techniques and maybe find a few more as we move on with our experiment.

A set back we have had is mainly time; time to focus on stress relief, time to do homework, time to practice color guard, and time to do this project too. Now that the guard season is drawing to an end we will have a bit more time but AP exams are coming up and that means a lot of stress from friends if not our own classes so we are going to have to figure out how to deal with that. Now that we have a feeling of the patterns in our lives, we are going to start seeing how other people extracurriculars play into their stress to see if it is similar or different to our own thoughts. The ways we have managed our stress is something that can easily translate to any other activity so I guess that the lesson of these two weeks is to take your days one step at a time and stay in the moment.

An Intro to Our Project

Hi, We're Amelia and Gillian and this is our blog about feelings. Yes, really. We want to share our struggles through our junior year of high school and help you through your own stressful situations.

What is 20 Time?

20 Time is a sort of project where we take 20% of our week to do something that we are passionate about and want to find a solution to. This is how companies like google invented gmail. Additionally, it increases productivity in our regular school work and allows us to live passionately!

For our project, we chose to study stress in students and find the real causes and ideas on how to reduce them, focusing on the role extracurriculars play in reducing or redirecting that stress. We want to raise awareness about the causes of stress and help students cope with the unreasonable amounts of it. In a recent study, students were experiencing higher stress levels in 2013 than asylum patients in the 1950s. We want to change this. Also, we want to somehow make parents aware of the stress on their students so that they can be more supportive, instead of making them take more academically hard classes or set unreasonably high expectations.

As of Feb. 1, we have been and will continue recording our feelings about school, stress, and our extracurriculars to see what their effects are on each other and how they relate. Moving forward, we will try various stress relieving techniques and see how they work, and find patterns in our stress levels to pin down the causes. We are going to do this from a 1st person POV, other than hearing it from patronizing doctors and psychologists, since we will know what we know and not have to tell an adult so they can't invalidate our struggles.

We both find this topic to be a growing issue, especially in our academically competitive community. Hopefully, reading this log full of feelings and emotional turmoil, you will glean at least a little information an how to manage your stress.