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.