A Stress Free Semester – Getting Life Under Control.
Hey friends! Do you ever just feel like your life is a little too cluttered at any given moment? I don’t know about you, but I feel like even if everything is in order, I always find something to stress out about or worry about. Senior year is going to be the year that I work on reducing this. Usually, I always refer this stress back to my desire to have control over things….I am a planner and I like to have every. little. thing. in order. Since this obviously isn’t exactly possible or practical, this is my chance to work on myself instead.
Here are three little tips and tricks that have helped me lower the stress in my life by a lot that I thought I would share with you, as the semester is only beginning!
1. Get Your Email Under Control. Simply waking up in the morning and checking my phone was a huge area of such stress for me because I would wake up to literally hundreds of emails. And I felt like I had to get my inbox under control right when I woke up, which caused a lot of unnecessary stress. Like I said, I probably bring most of this stress on myself anyway. I have done several things to majorly help with this problem. First, I set specific times to clean my inbox. When I wake up, I don’t feel compelled now to delete and reply to every single thing. Currently, I have two mornings and one evening that I dedicate about fifteen minutes to deleting and responding to other people’s emails. This helps me not spend much time in my email anyway. Then, I reduced the actual amount of emails coming in, too. Search your mailbox for the word “unsubscribe“. Doing this was a complete game changer for me. All kinds of emails popped up from different stores, services and actually a ton of companies I wasn’t interested in anymore. I believe I unsubscribed from every email that had the word unsubscribe on it except for about two stores.
2. Get Your Mornings Under Control. As you could probably tell from the last tip, mornings are a little rough for me. I am such a night owl and mornings are just awful. I’m constantly running, yes running, through my apartment trying to pull on shoes, brush my teeth and text my friends all at once. It’s a little bit of a problem. So, something that was a total game changer for me was preparing everything for the morning the night before. This was everything from looking at my weather app and picking out my outfit to putting a K-cup in my coffee maker so it was all ready at the push of a button when I woke up (I told you it was rough). This maximized my getting ready time and shaved a lot of minutes off of my routine, which was amazing. It is such a different feeling to not be starting my day feeling stressed to the max. Remember when I wrote about why self care is so vital? Well, this is one huge step in the right direction towards better self care that is super easy and doable!
3. Get Your Student Life Under Control. Maybe I feel compelled to talk about this because I’m still high on the life from finishing last semester with my highest GPA of college, but this is a really important thing that I wanted to touch on. When I think about last semester, sure, I remember a lot of long nights studying. But I also remember a ton of fun times. Being successful in college, I’ve realized, doesn’t always equal shutting yourself in your room and studying 24/7. Last semester, I set personalized goals for myself for each class that I was in. For example, I was pretty confident that I wouldn’t get as good of a grade in Microeconomics as I would in International Marketing (I was right, lol). So I set different goals for myself for each of these classes. But, being the extremely competitive person that I am, I hung these goals by my desk, and I was oh-s0 determined to stick to them. I ended the semester doing even better than I set my goals at, which was such a rewarding feeling. But, setting your sights on something is the first and so important step.
There you have it, friends. Those are some of the ways I have minimized all the stress that I carried with me. Sometimes I still stress out…I mean I think stressing out is pretty much inevitable, but it has been drastically reduced. So, who’s with me? Here’s to a low stress semester!
Much love,
Olivia