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You’re on holiday at the moment, blissfully free of all the tensions and stresses of campus life, but soon you will be going back and you may once again feel like the poor girl in our picture. Sorry for the reminder! There is an upside, though. You have time to think at the moment, and you can use that to practise how to counter that tension when it comes again. Here are some practical pointers.
1. Accept your tension as natural. When you get tense before a test or an exam, for example, remind yourself that if you were an athlete waiting for the starting whistle, you would experience the same symptoms, but you would see it as “psyching yourself up” rather than “stressing out”. You are faced with a test of your abilities. Your whole system is preparing for that. That’s natural and good – provided it doesn’t overpower you.
To keep yourself on an even keel all the time:
2. Have a schedule and stick to it rigidly. Go to bed at the same time every night, get up early, and set to work.
3. Start every day with a five-minute meditation. You can find an easy guide in the Thought for the Week titled Breathe time. That was written as support during exams, but it is a general grounding exercise which will put you in control, rather than being at the mercy of the emotions you’re trying so hard to suppress. Practise it now, when there’s no time pressure.
4. Reread our Thought for the Week of two months ago, Fear of Failure. This is the bogeyman that is threatening you, the dark shadow in the corner that scares you so much you can’t think. Face it to deal with it. Name it to tame it.
5. To help you do that, let’s go back to basics: the ABCDE of Resilience.
A is for the Activating event: What is the cause of the problem? You probably have something that is the main trigger for your stress. It may be a specific subject, or your family situation, or even relationship problems. Think it through and write it down.
B is for Belief: What belief is triggered by A? If the stress is about a subject, for example, the belief may be, “I will never be able to do this.” In a relationship it may be, “He will never love me.”
C is for Consequence: How does this activated belief make you feel?
D is for Dispute: Is this belief the only possible interpretation?Do you have evidence to support the connection you made?Is there a possible alternative interpretation?Really? Are you sure you’re not exaggerating?Can you choose a more positive interpretation of what happened, which would make you feel happier?E is for Energise: Having gone through this thought process, energy becomes available for making new plans to work on the problem.
Let’s see how this will work in practice. Take this example, which came up in one of StudyTrust’s mentor visits to campuses:
A third-year IT student from a deep rural background overcame huge obstacles by not only making it to university, but also all the way to third year. He did very well in his June exams, obtaining three distinctions. But now all was in the balance again. To graduate, he had to complete six months of “experiential learning” – he had to find somewhere to work for six months.
A: The Activating event was not getting a position to complete that training.
B: The Belief it triggered was, “They don’t look for achievement, they just pick.”
C: The Consequence was that he felt completely discouraged and helpless.
D: The mentor helped him Dispute the connection between A and B on the basis of information from other students.
- The evidence did not support the connection – other students had found placements, and this did not seem random.
- An alternative interpretation was that success was not random. The successful students had applied for more opportunities (9 on average, as opposed to his 3); he did not communicate well, using the “eish, ja-né” type of interaction; and he did not prepare well for interviews, because he did not believe it would make a difference.
- He was not exaggerating the impact, but …
- He could find a more positive interpretation. All the factors mentioned in 2 were under his control, which lifted the feeling of helpless discouragement.
E: From this process Energy flowed, which allowed him to plan new actions to change the situation: practising to communicate better, applying for more positions, improving his CV, and making use of his network.
See if you can apply this process to your fears and worries at the moment. Perhaps even ask a friend to help you work through the ABCDE, guiding you with critical questions and prompts. All of this involves the frontal cortex in the brain, putting the emotional “inside brain” back in its place.
Enjoy the holidays, but use the time to train your reflexes for the next section of the long-term race you have embarked on. If you were a real runner, you would not waste free time, you would use it to train to be even better when you’re back on the road!
From the GRAD team
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