Closing in

Every once in a while, we all feel stressed out. We tend to do different things to cope with them. Some people turn to drugs some smoking and others alcohol.

For some it’s a bit more hilarious, they start breaking things, spending money or my personal favourite, start coding. What I do, something not a very conventional, I pray. I don’t consider myself to be a very religious person, but I find that praying to some sort of higher power almost seems like offloading my worries at least temporarily to them. In a way you might find it odd, but that’s the way I cope with stress.

The high school I had studied in India, CIRS(Chinmaya International Residential school) had a very structured way of life. We had to get up every day (well except Sunday) at 5.30am in the morning, do some exercise which was followed by session of aarti class. Aarti is the Hinduism equivalent of a sermon. It always felt good to talk about positive things at the start of the day. Sure when you are a high school student, you don’t get stressed as much. But thinking back I suspect it did help a bit and it definitely influenced my current behaviour to cope with stress.

If one thing Engineering at University of Waterloo has taught us, is to juggle between multiple things at the same time with minimal resources. An inevitable by product of it at least at some point in your undergraduate life is burnout. If you are smart you will know when to quit what you are doing and get back to it later, instead of fighting a losing battle and making a mess. I am not endorsing giving up, just know when to take a break and do something else for a change and then get back to it fully charged. You would be surprised as to how much time it actually does end up saving in the long run.

I had this interesting discussion with a friend about a way to deal with stress. He said to try screaming. Scream your lungs out. He said that actually made him feel much better than anything else once he did. Never got to a chance to try it, I might give it a shot, the next time I feel stressed out.

So what do you do when things come “closing in”?