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.