Reducing Stress and Increasing Energy: Tips for College students

College plays a vital role in every individual’s life as it comes with sweet and sour moments making it an ultimate adventure. There is no denial in saying that sometimes educational requirements can be demanding and requires a lot of juggling between studies and personal life leading to stress and anxiety for the students.

College can make the best time in many people’s lives; it can also be somehow stressful. While a healthy amount of stress can be motivating and might push us to move forward and overcome the obstacles, it might sometimes even lead to less productivity, more tiredness, leaving us more prone to various diseases, making our lives difficult.

The good news is, there are easy solutions to restore the balance of a life. You don’t have to rely on medicines to reduce the level of stress in your life – there are much healthier options to cope up with it. We have listed some anti-stress tips that you should adopt in your daily routine to make your college years blissful.

• Create a Good Study Environment: Creating a nice soothing environment can reduce stress and help you learn faster. Many students switch to Aromatherapy and use essential oils which are well-known for being good stress relievers. Listening to classical music while studying can also soothe you and help you to learn and reduce distractions.
• Avoid unnatural energy boosters: Artificial stimulants or energy pills might surely help to pull off an all-nighter, but it will ultimately lead to energy crash and make you more prone to being stressed. “It’s like clipping the wires to your fire alarm while the house burns down,” Forbes says, “Just because you didn’t hear it doesn’t mean the house didn’t burn.”
• Know Your Learning Style: Every Individual has a different way of learning and retaining things. It is essential to know precisely whether you are a visual, kinesthetic or auditory learner so that you can set your daily schedule and study practices according to your learning style, making lessons easier to retain.
• Practice Visualizations: Visualization and imagery are proven to be proper stress management techniques. You can improve your test performance and reduce stress by imagining yourself achieving your goals. To practice this technique, you need to take a few minutes all by yourself, every day, and visualise what you’d like to happen in your future and then work hard to make it happen.
• Get Enough Sleep: You must be well-rested if you desire to perform best every time. Previous researches show that those individuals who are sleep-deprived have a harder time retaining and learning things which leads to poor performance in many areas. Hence, it is essential that you get good quality sleep at night. During those hectic days when you are overwhelmed with a lot of work, you can work around your schedule, so that you get enough sleep or you can also take power naps.
• Reduce coffee consumption: While this step may seem impossible for those individuals who rely entirely on coffee but you have to keep this in mind that every individual has a tolerance level when it comes to caffeine and if you increase the level of caffeine consumption, it might lead to an increased level of stress.
• Get emotional support: Adjusting to a new place can be extremely difficult and frustrating. Venting out all your frustrations to a trusted person can go a long way in fighting stress. Choose a family member or friend, who you believe to be non-judgemental and share your worries with them. You can also seek help from a professor or a professional counsellor if you want.
• Learn Study Skills: When you are aware of and practice specific study skills, your entire college experience becomes easier. Learning to stay focused on tasks and being organised according to your study schedule can enable you to get more things done when you study. Many of these skills transfer into productivity skills in your career in the future, so they are essential skill to master. Here are some tips that you can try following to make studying easier -master the art of note-taking, use mind maps which will help you to organise, visualise and summarise, read your lessons out loud, group study, improve your time management skills. These are some techniques that you can adopt, start picking some that work the best for you. Keep experimenting with these skills till you find what brings out the best results.
• Manage Time Wisely: It is essential that you allow yourself ample amount of time to work on your studies, if you want to to do well and planning ahead saves a lot of stress. It is incredibly essential that you set up a study schedule, take regular breaks and utilise other time management techniques.
• Get Organized: Having a set system like note-taking, keeping track of assignments can bring peace of mind that reduces some mental clutter. If you try to be organised, keep a calendar and have a decent schedule, it will prevent you from having significant amount of stress.

If you feel like you can no longer take the burden of books, classes, and papers, don’t go crazy. Follow these stress-management tips to help disperse the pressure.

Contributor Bio – The blog is presented by Sharda University. Sharda University is one of the largest universities in Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) offering 216 varied programmes.