These past two weeks have been a super stressful time in my life. School has played a huge part in that, and I've had to put a lot of things (including blogging) briefly on the back burner while I tackled some intimidating tasks, the biggest of which being my research paper for English that counts for almost my entire fourth quarter grade. Yikes.
That paper was the cause of late nights, tears, little sleep, poor outfit choices (this past week, when it was due on Wednesday, I was living in leggings and sweatpants with moccasins up until Thursday. Every day was Sweatpant Thursday.), and huge, huge amounts of stress. The extensive research took up so much time and was super confusing at times. Of course, I wanted it to be perfect in the end, so I didn't flinch at spending hours on end writing, editing, and revising the actual paper. Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, I ended up staying up until 3:30 am to finalize everything before I turned it in online that night and in class later that day.
Finally turning the paper in contributed to one of the biggest feelings of relief I've ever felt. It was like after six weeks, I could finally breathe. I no longer had to write in my planner, reminding myself to "Work on the Research Paper!!!" every night. My friends in class and I agreed that we would be beyond happy if we never had to hear a single word about our topics ever again.
My friends, the ones also writing papers and the ones who weren't, were my support system throughout the whole process. They offered encouragement, shared my misery, and even told me when I was putting too much pressure on myself and needed to just pull things back. On Wednesday, I was lucky enough to have one friend in particular who, seeing me waiting for a meeting to start after school, told me that I just needed to go home and sleep. I took his advice and left the meeting early, which was immensely helpful.
I found that sleep was the best way for me to deal with my stress. I needed to be well-rested and alert in order to be productive and fully invested in what I was doing. The other thing that really helped relieve some of my stress was dancing and working out. The nights I had dance or Poms practice gave me an outlet and a break from working. Dancing always puts me in a much better mood and refreshes me, and working out does the same thing. There isn't the emotional connection that I feel when I dance, but I've found it to be the next best thing when it comes to relieving my stress. The nights I didn't have dance, I cut out an hour to get on the elliptical and watch something from my Hulu queue. Apart from that, whenever I got a minute to write or work on a blog post was a great distraction.
As stressful as this situation was, I will be forever grateful that my first truly stressful project occurred so early in my life. The process of researching and writing this paper taught me countless things about myself and my true work habits that I will be able to use in the future. I have a better understanding of my strengths and weaknesses when it come to long-term projects that will surely be useful throughout the rest of high school and college, as well as in my career.
If you've made it this far in the post, thank you so much. It was really more for me to let everything go and celebrate that this hurdle has been officially jumped!
How do you deal with stress?
XO
North Shore Prep
