Golnaz Taherian | Arts Editor
Featured image courtesy of Jasmine Wiradharma, Comics Editor
It’s that time of the year again. A new semester is stretching out ahead of us, and soon enough it will be exam period. Students lives are more frantic than ever, with juggling work, class, personal relationships and sometimes, if there’s time, a little fun. Under these circumstances, stress arises naturally in everyone’s lives, causing internal turmoil, health problems, and frustration. Thus, it’s imperative for students to find a healthy means of managing and alleviating stress.
The morning is an extremely important time where we set our intention for the rest of the day. It’s so easy to wake up and get overwhelmed with assignments, deadlines, and exams. However, we need to make sure that our mornings are relatively calm. This sets the stage for a productive day—one which won’t fall apart at the seams.
A daily morning journal has been regarded by many as an incredibly worthwhile method of calming stress at the day’s beginning.
Journaling is the process of jotting down one’s thoughts and emotions in a notebook without judging or reflecting on the words and written themes. Through this process, we can look into ourselves, and rationally examine the various emotions, memories, anxieties and cravings which form our deepest subconscious parts.
One of the most malicious qualities of stress is how it often blocks our natural thought process and tangles up our thinking. Journaling, especially free-writing, allows us to unshackle our minds; it not also helps us to find room in our head, but also airs out our mind.
Try having a cup of tea, sitting down for at least 15 minutes, and simply scrawling down your thoughts without checking yourself. Just write, let it flow, and see what comes out. It can be an incredibly purging, stress-alleviating method of therapy.
Journaling also helps us strengthen the connection to our thoughts, instead of repressing them in the back of our minds. It’s easy for us to avoid stress or anxiety by trying to bury it beneath Facebook, candy, cigarettes, alcohol, television, or any other addictive behaviour. However, by trying to avoid our subconscious thoughts, they don’t simply disappear; they become superficially buried, revealing themselves through stress.
The best way to handle a problem is to face it, and journaling allows us to face our thoughts and emotions instead of letting them consume us.
Journaling is not only limited to our thoughts and emotions; it can also be a good tool for writing about how we want to structure our day. This way, we can have more control over our daily plans and activities because we’ve already set the intention; in a sense, we are planting a seed of intent within our psyche, so that we can cultivate a plant of action later on.
A gratitude journal is another way to improve our days and relieve stress. It’s easy to get caught up in pessimism, misery, frustration and negative thoughts. Gratitude journaling is a means to break the pattern of negative thinking, and to learn how to appreciate the positive parts of our lives.
In a world filled with problems such as hatred, war and tyranny—problems much greater than our own—we tend to lose sight of what’s really important. If more people put pen to paper, maybe we could prove that the pen truly is mightier than the sword.
