In a nutshell: (1) disconnect often; (2) manage your time well.
Let's start identifying common sources of stress and anxiety:
- School-work deadlines, many of them.
- Difficulty-level of some courses.
- Comparing oneself to what we perceive as the success of others.
- FOMO.
- Device addiction, distraction, lack of sustained focus.
- Personal health, family, and other issues.
- Feeling overwhelmed or "everything all at once".
All of these are valid reasons to feel stress and anxiety.
What can be done?
- Acceptance. Surprisingly, a common roadblock to managing
stress is lack of acceptance. It's easy, after all, to postpone
confronting it when there are deadlines, or to think of acceptance
as a form of weakness. There are many aspects to acceptance:
- Accepting the difficulty level of a course. This is not
a bad thing. If some material is challenging, it just is.
Accepting it without self-judgement, and committing to effort
is all that's needed.
- Accepting that the purpose of school is to prepare you for
the future rather than "get grades for the present". This means
avoiding shortcuts and being willing to pay the (grade) price.
- Accepting oneself. This is perhaps the hardest acceptance of all.
We'll say more about this later in the course.
- Awareness.
Once you accept, the next thing to work on is developing awareness.
Awareness of when you are losing focus, for example,
and what distractions are particularly strong.
- Scheduled disconnection. Research has now firmly established
the multifaceted phenomenon of how our brains are rewired by
attention fracking, FOMO, and algorithmically-driven distraction.
What you can do:
- Create blocks of device-free time, and rigidly stick to them,
keeping your devices out of reach.
- Go black-and-white on your phone.
- Sign off from social media on weekdays.
This will give you time to manage (next).
- Savvy time-management:
- Eat healthy and get enough sleep. Nothing is going to work
without your body's cooperation.
- Make a weekly calendar with large blocks of study time,
and stick to it. You can adjust each week but try not to adjust mid-week.
Building in a schedule-commitment is what matters.
- Accept that you'll miss out on some activities, but ensure that
each week has at one time-limited fun activity.
- Single-tab mode, and long blocks of focus.
This is hard to do and needs to be gradually developed; that is,
don't get too ambitious right away. Each week, aim to create longer
blocks of time where you have completely turned off distractions,
and are focused on only one task (single-tab in a browser) at a time.
Use an inexpensive silent mechanical timer (not your phone) to time a block.