Some Fantastic Stress Management

At 1:30 pm today, I hadn't started the paper. Not a single word. It was due in exactly four hours and I wasn't even sure what I was going to write about. I hadn't thought about it for even a moment. It was panic time.

I'm not very good with stress. It affects my sleep, social life, diet, and overall health. School has always been a major contributor to such stress and no matter how hard I work to spread out the workload or organize myself, around this time in the semester I end up super stressed out about life.

Today, though, I handled it better than I probably ever have. Leaving my class at 1:30, I headed to my room, completely nervous about the paper. About a block away from my apartment I suddenly turned left and headed to the Rec Center. Yep, you read that right. The Rec. With four hours to crank out a paper, I decide to not even work on it. Was I crazy? Did I just give up? I'm actually not sure what happened in that moment, but that left turn turned my whole day around.

In between each crunch on the ab machine, I took deep breaths until I lost most of the nervous energy. On the arm machines, I created a thesis statement in my head. While working triceps, I noted all the supporting materials I would need to gather when I got home. By the time I starting on the rowing machine, I was confident, actually whispering lines out loud and repeating good ideas so I wouldn't forget. Introduction. Row. Thesis. Row. Point about listening in the classroom. Row.

I walked out of that weight room straight to my desk at home, typed the entire paper and took an hour nap before heading to class. I'm completely serious. No sitting in front of my computer for an hour. No getting up and sitting back down 10 times. No lethargy. A workout, a paper, and a nap. Boom, boom, boom.

Sometime my mind just needs to slow down. You wouldn't jog in place all day and then run a marathon and I can't expect my mind to be running all day going nowhere either if I want it to perform well. I took some time, cleared my mind and then set it to specific training so it could execute a task. And was that paper written perfectly? Of course not. But you can't win them all. I'm just glad to finish the race today and keep my health in the process.