My experience thus far with university has been that university-related stress comes in waves: I start the semester, I go to class, I read what I need to read and study what I need to study, but otherwise coast along for a few weeks, without much work. Then everything hits me. I just got through a midterm and three essays, all due in the span of two weeks. That's difficult to handle, especially since in the meantime I still have classes to be attended and readings to be read (like Henry Fieldings' Joseph Andrews, written in 1742, which is certainly enjoyable enough, but really, really long). I also have a part-time job to maintain on top of that, plus all the things I want to do: watch TV, read the books I want to read, have a social life, get enough sleep.
I was extremely unhappy at certain points over those two weeks, and there were times at which the source of that unhappiness didn't even seem to be the mountain of schoolwork anymore. I was feeling pretty terrible, so that terribleness started to grow and spread to other aspects of my life. I freaked out about the fact that I'm still in my little hometown, when there's not much for me to do here and almost all of my closest friends live somewhere else. I sank into a teeth-gritting, baggy-eyed monster of despair every time I had to go into work and deal with... (shudder) customers. About a thousand other things set me off into a bad mood, although they were in reality so meaningless I can't even remember what they are now. My stress snowballed; it grew (into a bigger ball of stress), picking up speed and carrying me downhill to the point where I convinced myself I was absolutely, irrevocably miserable.
This week, that pile of schoolwork has pretty much been demolished. I forced myself through the last fifty pages of Joseph Andrews last night and happy-danced a little when I finished. I used the stormy weather as an excuse to sleep my way through most of the weekend, and used the internet to talk to some of those people that I miss having around. I was perfectly happy to go into work and deal with whatever it threw at me, not just for the money but also for the sake of feeling like I'm doing something productive. In other words, I was my usual self, with no traces of the self-pitying "so miserable!" self I was last week.
"Think positive," is one irritatingly cheerful cliché that we've all heard, but like many clichés, a little experience forces you to admit it's good advice. The only thing that's changed between last week and this week is my pile of schoolwork, but last week's self was completely prepared to angst about anything and everything. School stressed me out, put me in a bad mood. That bad mood put me in a state of mind where I tended to think of every situation with a fairly negative outlook, expecting, believing, and feeling the worst. Negative thinking can lead you from simple school stress to casting serious doubts on personal relationships, your past, your future, your self-worth.
One minute you're worrying about keeping your grades up, then you're worrying about failing out of school and never being in the career you wanted to be in, being forced to get a job at your local disgustingly greasy fast-food restaurant, never rising above the position of Lowly Fry Cook, and as a result of that being kicked out of your apartment because you can't afford the rent and then you're homeless and living on a street corner in a cardboard box but then you find out the corner's some other homeless guy's turf and he wants you to leave and you try to peacefully negotiate but he's crazy and all of a sudden he's throwing cats at you and ohmygodyoupotentiallyhaveapotentialcatallergy and...
A slight exaggeration perhaps, but you get the point. We've all had those little moments of stress and little negative thoughts that we've blown completely out of proportion and taken to the ridiculous point where we're not even stressed by our grades anymore; instead we're freaking the hell out about our potential cat allergies. Just because of a little bit of stress that we take to ridiculous, disproportionate levels of feeling sucky.
Of course, de-stressing is not as easy as simply deciding to think positive, but it's a solid first step, and while it's not guaranteed to work every time, it's pretty simple: whenever you realize your negative thoughts have started snowballing, gaining size and speed in a terrifying downward spiral to pain and misery and self-loathing, you just... stop. Think about something else. Read a book. Watch Doctor Who. Bake a pie, or go for a jog, or just scream violently into your pillow, but whatever you do, don't let yourself think your own way into unhappiness.
Positive thinking alone is not going to make us happy, of course: some negative thoughts need to be had, and most problems take real action to deal with them, but what thinking positively can do is help save us some unnecessary emotional trouble. By avoiding the snowball, we can avoid creating problems that don't really exist. And then we only have to deal with the ones that really do.
Or, we can stop wasting our time and energy panicking about our potential cat allergies... long enough to study and use that time to get those grades up.
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