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