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.