We are officially in the last stretch before finals – the period between Halloween and Thanksgiving where you’re not sure what kind of holiday spirit to dial in to and all of a sudden term papers and last ditch effort midterms are springing up all around. Add in a natural loss of productivity as you can almost taste a home cooked meal, and even the most on top of their work person can find themselves prone to bouts of anxiety as deadlines become ever shrinking and nights in the library subsequently become longer.
However, in viewing stress as a psychologically damaging mental strain that inhibits performance, that’s exactly what it becomes. Kelly McGonigal, a health psychologist, did a Ted talk at TedGlobal 2013 on seeing stress as a positive entity, a message that has not been decimated widely enough as evident on any college campus. Her main points were that by changing how we think about stress – like the bodily responses such as heart racing, rapid breath, and sweating that are all attributed characteristics – you can change how your body responds to stress. For example, in a research study conducted at Harvard University where participants took these characteristics to mean positive and energizing things, it was found that not only were they more confident and less anxious, but their physical response changed in that their blood vessels stayed relax, not causing damage on the heart.
There has been scholarly agreement in this field of transforming stress into an advantage. Shawn Anchor, Co-Founder and CEO of Good Think (a happiness consultant firm that offers speaking, consulting, and training on bridging academic discourse and real life applicability concerning positive psychology) found that by seeing a stressor as a challenge and thinking about it in a positive and concerned manner rather than a negative and worries way, the brain bypasses the fight or flight debate and enters into a broaden and build mindset. This tweak allows for the discovery of new possibilities and more innovation rather than panic into a state of unproductivity.
While it can be difficult to see midterms or finals as something positive instead of tests that can determine your grades (and if you’re in an anxious and hyperbolic mood, the rest of your life), you’re only doing yourself a disservice by thinking anything otherwise. Tests are an opportunity to rise to a challenge, and by thinking of them as opportunities instead of academic cliffs, your mind is prone to performing better. Not to mention, the negative effects of stress on the body are indisputable and come along when you think about stress in the traditional scary way, so by changing your mindset, you’re also helping your physical wellbeing. Maybe sleep will come easier and you won’t want to reach for that family size bag of brownie brittle at 3AM, and maybe you’ll go into a test or complete a paper with complete confidence and ease. Whatever the outcome, it’s definitely a worthy experiment to exercise in the last bit of first semester.