Stress Management

With so much hustle-bustle and frenetic time scheduling in IIT, comes the important of stress management. ‘Stress’ itself is a hi-fi word for students and if somebody even says that “I am stressed out”, he gets laughed at by others. This is because, in IIT, we students lead a ‘chilled life’ (couldn’t find another word for it!). We cannot blame anybody but ourselves for deadline pressures, academic pressures, or even extra-curricular pressures. So we need to look at stress from another perspective. We face stress in the form of being unable to play Age of Empires, or play table-tennis, or go for quizzing and so on. Of course, academics is primary, but academic pressures are secondary, and become chief concern only at deadlines.

Moving on to the definition of Stress Management we once again invoke Mr. Wikipedia:

“Stress management encompasses techniques intended to equip a person with effective coping mechanisms for dealing with psychological stress, with stress defined as a person's physiological response to an internal or external stimulus that triggers the fight-or-flight response”

In simple words, stress management involves methods for coping with stress. For that, we need to define stress, which is understood from the reactions of a person to a given problem.

On a scale of 10, I would shamelessly give myself a 9. That would be a statement “in general”

• I would not say that I don’t face stress at all, or react neutrally to stress. Even I am a normal student, I make exclamations of excitement or throw curses at the situation. But internally, I believe that I can stay calm in most situations.
• I believe I am rational enough not to think about taking foolish measures like taking to alcohol, smoking, drugs which others fall prey to, or in some rare cases even suicide.
• My stress management is not direct, just because I believe that things get done when they really have to get done.
• Things that I do to calm down can be as ordinary as going to Nescafe for a quick coffee, starting a ‘short’ game on the laptop (which rarely ends up being short), watching a good video or a movie, and best of all, spending time with my friends.

What really catches my attention are the lengths to which people go to manage stress, taking breathing exercises, attending encouraging talks, or even going to the lengths of shelling out huge money to listen to a celebrity author giving tips on the so-called ‘stress management’, which I can go to lengths describing. I wont do that here, because I don’t believe in them, and that’s my conscience talking. People say they benefited them, yes I wouldn’t disagree, but I fail to believe that they can boost my confidence in my lifestyle or reduce my stress.

I certainly wouldn’t deny that I face stress, its just that stress management is situational for me, and in most situations, I am able to manage stress pretty well. Living the life of a hostel student has definitely taught me to judge stress factors and coping measures. If you are satisfied and able to remain calm from within, then nothing else matters to you.