Dealing with end of term stress... Need advice please!

[anchor31]

Hi all! I''m going through a though time at school and I''d like some advice...

I''m a somophore in college and am studying for a biology degree; term ends on April 28th. For some reason, all our profs have been giving us the projects, lab reports and assignments in the second half of term. For an equally obscure reason, all the said projects are team projects, with teams of up to five people!

With everyone having four or five classes, this is barely manageable. Tension is running high, and everyone is started to get really pissed off with their numerous teammates in every class. A fight almost broke out before start of class on Wednesday morning (not kidding!), and I frequently here fellow students arguing in the corridors and computer labs about some report or other. Bitching and backstabbing abounds. Needless to say, it''s quite an unpleasant studying environment!!

I worry about my projects and barely have time to study, I''ve had to pull 12-hours days all week and will probably have to keep doing so for the last month. I have become so stressed out with everything, I''m on a constant adrenaline high. I''m not hungry and when I eat I feel sick. I still eat because I have to, but I have digestion problems. I can barely sleep, and when I do I have anxiety dreams. I''m very high-strung and irritated, which certainly doesn''t help with all the teamwork issues!

If anyone here has tips about dealing with end of term madness and stress, any non time consuming things I can do to help me relax or anything that might help me through this, please share. I still have a month to go and right now it looks unsurmountable.

Thanks in advance!

 

[sunkist]

Hi Anchor

I''m sorry to hear about all of your school stress! It sounds pretty bad. I''ve just come out of a month of stress from finishing group projects and papers. Luckily I''m in spring break now. You''ll be there soon!! I used pricescope as a destresser

just to take a quick break while I''m trying to think of what to write next. And about working with groups, just do what you can and only what you have to. Prioritize according to which project is due first or which is worth more for your grade, and work on the most important stuff first. Maybe buy some frozen meals or other really quick food that you don''t really have to prepare. I''ve actually never done this, but it would help with getting you a "decent" meal (ok, maybe not decent as in healthy, but it might fill you up...). Anyways, I also find it important to take a night off. Go out to dinner or something and forget about school for a couple hours. The sanity and relief it gives me from that awful anxiety feeling in my stomach is soooo worth it! About working with groups, are you the group leader, is there one? If not, let them be the leader and make the major decisions. Maybe I''m not so much of a team player even though I try to be, but I try to take charge too much.

Uh oh! I have to go. Good luck!!!

 

[bookworm21]

Hi anchor, I'm so sorry to hear you're stressing out so badly. What helps me out when I'm stressed are 20 minute power naps and a little bit of exercise. Just a ten-minute walk or something to clear my mind, and the fresh air really helps with de-stressing.

Hope this helps and hang in there!

ETA: And to help put you to sleep before those power naps, I'd suggest taking the walk, wait ten minutes, then nap. There's something about the walk that helps your breathing so you can sleep a little better.

 

[Rhapsody]

Anchor, I''m sorry you''re having such a stressful term. I know the last 4 weeks or so of each semester for me was painful. I would be on campus from 8 in the morning till 10 at night 5 days a week and toward the end I would start talking about burning the school down. Not pretty. And I was BAD with group projects. Almost every single one I would just end up doing all the work because it actually took less time to just do it all myself than deal with getting everyone together and on the same page.

I have bachelors in both biology and psychology, and I always found it a little ironic that most of my psych classes had very little group work and almost every single bio class had some sort of group project/presentation. I dont know what the nature of your group projects are but it always seemed easiest to just divy up the work and each person had sections they did on their own and we just got together for a few minutes every week to make sure there were no gaps and all the requirements were covered.

Sometimes you just have to tell yourself that its just a few weeks, it''ll suck but you can get through it. I still remember my worst week ever lol its burned into my brain but I also remember the weekend after how wonderful it felt to have finished it all and I think I ate cheesecake for 3 of my next 6 meals lol Take some time for yourself, when it starts to feel overwhelming just step back for a minute and remind yourself "this too shall pass".

 

[Blenheim]

Anchor, I''m sorry that you''re going through all of this. As I think I said in an LIW thread, I''ve had a lot of stuff going on and a hard time dealing with it all, so I''ve started to get therapy. We''ve been concentrating with dealing with anxiety. (Anxiety makes chronic pain worse, and chronic pain makes you more anxious, and it just escalates.) I''ll try to share different things that we''ve gone over.

Feelings of anxiety are often accompanied by feelings of pervasiveness, powerfulness, and permanency. For example, you hear students bitching in the hallways, and think that they might be saying similar things about you behind your back (pervasive). It can feel powerful, because it''s everywhere that you go and can affect your ability to study. It can feel permanent, like it''s going to continue being this way.

One good thing to do is to ask yourself if this is going to matter in a year? Ten years? That can help to ease feelings of permenancy. Also, if you think that people might be bitching about you as well, ask yourself if it really matters. Do you really care what they think? If you''re worried about other people hearing them bitching about you and thinking badly of you, think about how you view the people saying these things. It often reflects more poorly on them than on the subject of their conversation, and tensions are so high that most people will take what they''re saying with a grain of salt.

(By the way, I''m just using the bitchiness as an example but this can be applied to anything that''s stressing you.)

Exercise is a great idea. Try to get enough sleep. It may be tempting to drink a lot of coffee or other caffeinated drinks to be alert and get everything done, but they can also add to feelings of anxiety.

One more thing that can really help is meditation. It really helps you to become more aware of what anxiety feels like and what calm feels like, and allows you to address anxious feelings before they get that overwhelming. After some experience meditating, you can kind of capture the calm feelings more easily (or so I''m told; I just started this week). The following meditation should take about 20 minutes:

1) Focus on sounds, near and far, noticing but not trying to interpret or understand. Do this for 2-5 minutes.

2) Focus on breathing for a couple of minutes, noticing the rhythm, the sensation of tightness followed by relaxation, the sound of your own breath.

3) Count breaths until you reach exactly 20 breaths. If you lose track, simply start over.

4) Focus on each breath, saying to yourself "just this one" as you inhale, "breath" as you exhale.

5) Do a "turning of the mind," focusing on each moment and the absense of problems in the moment. Say to yourself "everything is right" with each breath in, and "as it is" with each breath out. Do this for 2-5 minutes.

6) Scan your body for tension. Imagine each breath drawing in the tension, and each breath letting it out.

7) Stop when you feel relaxed.

I hope that some of this helps.

 

[strmrdr]

well back in the stone age the group working on a project would go get flat out drunk then everyone would be too hung over to fight and would get the project done. Worked for me.
course I was pretty much drunk all the time anyway at that time so it didnt make much difference :{
Not that I recommend it of course.....
not what id do today since i don''t drink.

So ill serve as an example of what not too do!

 

[Blenheim]

Haha, Storm, I think that is an example of what not to do. In my experience, hung over people can be pretty crabby, so I''m surprised that that eased the fighting!

Although -- I''ve been in a couple study groups where we did work on campus, and "rewarded" ourselves as a group afterwards by a trip to the local bar to split a pitcher of beer, a trip to the local icecream shop, etc. Everyone tried to get work done quickly so that we could go earlier, if possible. Doing non-work stuff together also helped us bond. Oh, those were the good old days... (I''m the only one who hasn''t graduated.)

 

[strmrdr]

Date: 3/25/2006 10:12:45 AM
Author: Blenheim
Haha, Storm, I think that is an example of what not to do. In my experience, hung over people can be pretty crabby, so I''m surprised that that eased the fighting!

Well if thats the case they didnt get drunk/hung over enough repeat the next day you want em so just the sound of someone breathing is painful.
hehehehe
Looking back on it, well it was pretty stupid but we usualy got very high scores.
It was usualy black boxes ie: they gave us the input and expected output and we had to design a device to do that.
It was something I was good at and we always scored very high on that part.
2 other guys that I usualy teamed up with were good at building it once I designed it so it worked out.
What sucked is when we had to do more than 3 people to a group.
Thats when the problems started and if the others were too hung over to show up then it was really the best of times :}

 

[anchor31]

Thanks everyone! All your advice is really apreciated, and just having the support helps.

Bleinheim - Thank you so much! I do some meditation, and getting ome new exercises to try is always nice and helpful. I''ll try that.

 

[firebirdgold]

Er, probably not helpful.. but the profs are probably trying to prepare you for real life when you do have to work with a team. I swear there are days when I want to drop my bf''s teammates into acid! G. knows what he wants to do to them! Working with people is probably the hardest part of life in post-college world.

Since you have several projects in different classes with teams, my recommendation is to pick the top one or two classes that matter to you most. In which classes do you care about the grade or the prof recommendation the most? Pick those and start whacking your teammates over the head and organize them yourself. For the other projects let someone else take that role and just do the work s/he assigns to you.

When it comes right down to it, how important are the grades? You just need to pass, usually. My bf is at the top of his field, yet didn''t get straight A''s in college and is only now finishing up his ph.d. Your grades are not as important as your health. Granted, this advice should be taken with a grain of salt. I''ve gone back to college for a degree in CS, and have gotten totally obsessive about my grades.

 

[gailrmv]

I''m in grad school now and I am going through a very stressful semester too. Group projects in school can be more of a pain than groups in the real world (I worked for years before returning to school) for a lot of reasons, but I think schedule coordination and also the tendency of some people to free ride is worse in school.

I don''t deal really well with anxiety either, and have found it to be constant in some of the jobs I''ve had but less so in other jobs. Knowing how you react to anxiety and what makes you stress out could be very helpful in finding the best job/career for you after college. Try to think of it as an opportunity.

Just hang in, follow the excellent advice others are giving, and remember that there is a light at the end of the tunnel!

Good luck!