How to Deal With Stress

A guide from someone who doesn’t care (most of the time)

Everybody has had to deal with stress at some point in their lives.

For most people, their first experience of stress was in school.

School is truly a very stressful environment if you consider that it should be a place designated towards learning.

Anyway, that’s a topic for a different story — here are some tips on how to deal with stress in your daily life.

What Is Stress?

How come that we feel stressed?

It may sound like a dumb question, but it’s not as trivial as one may think.

If we understand precisely how stress develops inside of us, it will be much easier to combat it.

How Stress Develops

We feel stressed when we have to do something and are on a tight deadline (like a big school assignment or work task).

We feel stressed when we have to do something that may have a big impact on our future (like an important exam).

In general, we can say that we feel stressed when there’s a lot of work to do and we fear that we won’t be able to do it well enough and/or on time.

Stress In School

I have an easy fix for most students out there.

This is one of the easiest forms of stress to combat.

I see other students all the time stressing over every single exam, being worried that it might not go well and whatnot.

Let me tell you something: the exam you are worrying about most likely doesn’t matter. Stressing over such small things is futile — why would you care about something that does not have a big impact on your future?

An exam, especially in high school, even if it doesn’t go that well, is not that big of a deal. Even if it means getting a lower grade on your report card, it’s not that big of a deal.

Please, everybody, stop caring about meaningless things.

Try your best, and if your best does not meet your expectations, don’t worry, you tried your best.

Stress In Life

Let’s get to the fun part.

This applies partially to school as well, but I am mainly referring to the meaningful kinds of stress.

Like these:

• Important exams (the ones that actually matter)
• Job interviews
• Musical performances
• Public speaking
• And many more

In all of these situations, you are stressed because you are afraid of messing something up.

Like, imagine messing up your speech in front of many people. That would be embarrassing, right?

Or, imagine messing up your job interview. You need that job, what if you then don’t get it?

Thoughts like these are the problem.

First of all, you have to realize something:

Stress Is Useless

What’s the advantage of being stressed?

• You are more likely to mess up because you are thinking about messing up so much.
• You are demolishing your quality of life for the time that you’re stressed.
• You are diminishing your ability to do other things because you are so focused on that one thing that is stressing you out.

This already helps some people, and I know that because realizing this has helped me a lot.

Being stressed is not going to help you in any way. Having the urge to do something about it will, but the stress itself is useless.

Stress During Performances

When I say “performances”, I mean things like:

• a musical performance
• a speech
• a presentation
• a sports competition or race

Things like these are all situations where you are expected to perform a certain way (or at least you expect it from yourself).

For me at least, stress is oddly found before the performance itself.

While doing the thing, I am so focused on that, that I forget about the people watching or the fact that I am competing.

This is another tip: to get rid of stress during performances, focus on the thing you are doing.

I have been playing the piano for around ten years at this point, and during that time I had to deal with various levels of performance anxiety.

While performing, I just focus on the piece I am playing, what’s about to come next, and how I can do it well.

That usually gets rid of the anxiety during the performance (which is the most important thing).

If you’re giving a speech, focus on the topic you’re talking about.

I know this sounds silly, but it’s literally that simple.

Focus on what you are doing, do it as if you were doing it at home.

One more tip for stress during a performance is to just come prepared.

Again, it may sound obvious, but trust me when I say that it makes a big difference and many people don’t give this fact the importance it deserves.

If you have to do something — play the piano, take an exam, whatever — prepare yourself for this thing you will be doing. You will be much calmer on the day of the event.

Stress Before A Performance

If you’re stressed about something that you will be doing, I, first of all, would like to refer you back to the point in which I said that “stress is useless”.

Especially before the stressful event itself.

In addition, you can prepare yourself for the event, to kind of distract yourself from the negative thoughts.

Let’s go back to the example of the piano performance. If you feel like you’re not good enough or that you might mess up, practice some piano to calm your nerves.

Not only is it productive, but it gets your mind off from the stressful thought processes.

If you want you can also do something else to distract yourself, but I found that practicing the thing that worries me gives me a deeper level of relaxation afterward. You feel like you did something useful to combat this feeling, not just hide from it.

Stress From Work

You probably won’t like this answer.

Most work-related stress problems can be resolved with some mere organization and planning.

Don’t leave everything for the last few days. This also applies to school.

Do little chunks of work each day and you will most likely be fine.

If there is truly so much work that you cannot manage even with good planning and discipline, then there is not much I can do for you except some of the things I mentioned above (stressing over things is useless).

Simply do the work and try to be as focused as possible; that’s it, unfortunately.

Times will come where you will feel stressed and you won’t be able to do anything about it, but those cases are the huge minority.

For approximately 95% — 99% of cases the tips mentioned above should apply (for most people).

One More Thing

Many people confuse stress with excitement.

These feelings are not the same thing.

Being excited about something is fine.

If you’re excited about the speech that you’ll be giving, that’s great!

Being excited is like “looking forward to it” whereas stressing over something is like “being worried”.

In this article, I have mixed “performance anxiety” and “stress”, even though these two things are not the same too. Maybe I will write another article where I will go more into detail on the differences and tackle each one more individually, but for now, this should suffice.

Conclusion

Whether it’s from school or work or some other project that you’ll be working on, there will come a time when you will feel stressed.

That’s what reality is like.

In most cases, these tips will be of much use for a lot of people.

In a few cases, you will just have to deal with the stress I’m afraid.

Hopefully, you don’t find yourself in one of those situations, but if you do, I wish you all the best and it will surely be over soon!

Thank you very much for reading until the end and I hope to see you in one of my other articles!

I wish you a good rest of your day!