"I'm Too Stressed!"

It’s 10 pm. A huge project report has to be done. I have four words written down. Name, date and two words, “I’m doomed”. It’s due Tuesday, damn it, that’s tomorrow. I have two 30-minute presentations on Thursday about a topic I know nothing about. Another 4-page essay is due Friday.

After a hell of a week, it’s finally Friday night. Friends call me out for some beer. Even though I’m dog tired, I go out; can't miss out on that! We end up sleeping at 4 AM. After a good long sleep, I wake up at 5 pm. I clean the house and do the laundries. After relaxing for a few hours, the clock ticks midnight. Then it hits me, I forgot to do submit my resume.

It feels like we have something to do every single day. We don't have time to relax, do some things we really want to do. Day by day, we are bound to our computers, typing out our next report as the professor smiles as she announces our next assignment. We live in such a highly stressed-out society. In every social stratum, we see stress. Whether you’re rich, poor, employed, unemployed, a teenager, or an adult we all have stress. The stressors are uncountable.

Living in this kind of society humans tend to show two very natural responses. We either fight or flight. The fight-or-flight response is a terminology that was coined by an American psychologist Walter Bradford Cannon. He explains that when an animal perceives a harmful event, attack, or threat to survival, the nervous system prepares the animal to either fight or flee. Humans also have the same reaction. Our brain orders our body to pump adrenaline. Our whole body is in the state of alarm. At this point, we have to decide whether we are going to stay and fight or turn around and flight. If we look at it from a student’s perspective, we can either do the assignment, or we can just run away from reality, though consequences will catch up.

If we took the former solution of resisting and fighting our stressors, we may or may not be able to solve the problem in front of us. In any case, we will have handled our difficulties and become more and more resilient to stress. I want to call this adapting. Adapting is usually seen as a positive response. It helps us grow through the experiences we have. The next time we face situations similar to the ones we have overcome, we will be able to handle it in a more effective way.

But life is not so simple that it will stop at one stressor. Stressors continuously come at you. Sometimes they come one by one but other times they come all at the same time. When we go through the infinite loop of high stress and overcoming the stress, we come to a point where we break apart. This is called burnout. We come to a state where we have no more emotional and physical strength to go on. There are three major signs that tell us we are burnt out.

We come to a state of physical and emotional exhaustion.
Our thoughts become cynical and we have a tendency to emotionally detach ourselves from people.
We begin to have feelings of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment. In short, we become a mess.

This is where our second response, flight, comes in handy. Running away from stress is not an act of cowardness. It is from the desperate desire to protect oneself from harm. It is needed to recuperate from all the battering we have received from the raging storm of stressors. It is indispensable to surviving. The longer we try to not take time to recover from stressful experiences, the longer our flight response will become.

I would like to share a solution that can help us maintain a healthy stress-life. The solution is to have many fight and flight response cycles. Every time you overcome a stressful situation, reward yourself with something that will take your mind off from any worries or tasks. The actions of flight will be different for all people. It could be eating, sleeping, watching movies, and meeting friends.

But I bet it’s probably something many of you are already doing without knowing. During exam week, don’t you find yourself sitting at the desk watching a Youtube clip? Or swiping through Amazon to see what’s on sale? But many of us do it the wrong way. The first error we make is that we feel like we have wasted our time and hate ourselves after watching a 30-minute clip. We should never think of the time we use for flight as a wrong behavior. Think of it as an investment to create a healthier mentality. The second error we make is that we overdo it. It’s good to spend an hour or two to take some pressure off but if we go for 3~4 hours, it creates an even bigger stress that comes from procrastination. So, the second solution is to schedule your flight time. It not only relieves you from stress but it also gives you the motivation to do what you have to do. I usually say to myself, “If I finish until chapter 4, I’ll watch a movie and then I’ll get back to studying.”

Stress is not a bad thing at all. It stimulates us to think and act, to learn and apply. But it doesn’t mean that we should go on whipping ourselves to work or study harder. Don’t become a slave to stress, rather, learn to control it. Of course we will never get an absolute grasp of stress as life is unpredictable but we can at least try to keep a safe distance from it.

I would like to share an opinion. I believe that society is created by humanity for the purpose to thrive together. But it seems that it is causing us to be miserable. Currently, I'm teaching middle schoolers at an institution and I hear and see so many who hate the life they are living. The saddest thing I heard from them was that they live just because they were born. We are living in such an irony where we aim to create a happy future by grinding and sacrificing our souls and bones. Let’s not do that. Why don’t we search for happiness in the now?