Stress Management Final Project

The speaker discusses their journey with stress management, focusing on how they prioritize what truly matters to them rather than societal expectations. They mention specific stressors such as winter weather and math, and how they have learned to cope with these challenges. They emphasize the importance of being comfortable with stress and having gratitude for it, as it can be motivating and necessary for growth. The speaker also shares personal experiences with academic competition and the benefits of incorporating breaks and rewards into their routine to avoid burnout. hello this is for stress management and it is my final project recording and I didn't plan what I was going to say but I wrote a lot so I'm gonna just pretend I'm doing a podcast or something but this is about kind of how I've grown in my journey with stress and how I have learned to really I don't know I guess worry about the things that actually matter to me and not what you're quote unquote supposed to care about like when you're a teenager the assumption is that you're like freaking out over colleges and you have all this social pressure and things of that nature but I kind of have a more broad view of like college applications and things like that so even though it's important to me I'm not really heavily focused on that okay I need to talk faster so these are some like small things these aren't the most stressful things but they definitely are things in my life first winter the cold months really just get me down I don't know why it's I think it's the association with like being overwhelmed and not having a lot of sun and a lot of people in my family hate the cold and hate like the bad weather so it kind of just rubs off on me and I'm trying to be more open-minded about the seasons and the weather because these are things you can't control and you have to kind of separate yourself from it next math I've always been a very engaged student like I really love learning I love school like that sounds so nerdy but it's true and especially moving here I love school even more because it's like good people and good academics and not just like whatever and but math has always been a little bit more of a struggle a little bit more of an effort to produce good grades whereas my other classes I felt like I could kind of just put in a little bit of effort and get good results and it's really forced me to have better habits and be creative in my study patterns and just find out how I operate and I think that's really important actually to have those kinds of barriers but yeah math is still a little bit of a stress for me because it makes me feel stupid sometimes and that's just a bad way to I don't know a bad thing to rule your life around because if you feel uncomfortable doing something or trying something new makes you feel stupid and you can't get past those initial feelings then you're never going to accomplish anything important and you're still going to feel bad about yourself like for example I play the piano it makes me feel stupid all the time but I still have to practice and I still push myself to do it because it really just adds so much character and perseverance and you're going to encounter hard things in life oh my gosh okay motivational speaker I'm talking a lot next is kind of building on that idea is how learning to be comfortable under stress and maybe comfortable isn't the right word but learning to be able to sit with the feelings and not add extra stress onto your stress if that makes sense like through this class we talked a bit about how stress is a normal healthy part of being a human and it serves an important function it has when we were like cave people and we had to watch out for saber-toothed Tigers like it's very important and it can feel like a lot but I think it's easy for us and this goes into our school and like high academic standards and the stress that we collectively feel it's easy to get bogged down by this feeling that it's too much that we're too busy that we can't I don't know succeed or perform well because we're so like there's so much stuff filling our time but I think it's important to kind of take a step back and look in the context of the world and notice that we are very very lucky to have so many things planned out for us and have such functional schedules this is something I try not to take for granted because this kind of makes us feel like we serve a purpose and it's challenging but challenges are so necessary especially for teenagers and young people so it kind of makes me feel better knowing that like I'm in the same boat as everyone else and just having gratitude for stress which I guess I'm going to talk about more in later slides okay what else do I talk about here things I do to make myself feel less anxious and comfortable is I really revel in my alone time and I like to rest read do art clean my room take care of my plants listen to music all these things are great like the music activities in class we did okay what else do I say um I think talking about your stress to other people can be interesting especially people who aren't in classes with you or maybe aren't in school with you like family or random people because it can diminish your stress in a good way and make you realize that your problems you're experiencing in high school aren't really life breaker problems but it can also make you feel like like it's not hard enough or that you shouldn't be stressed or that it's not important but I don't think that's good too so I tend to keep my thoughts to myself okay building on my other point about having gratitude for stress um stress isn't all negative which we've talked about and can be motivating adrenaline boosting and it's like I was talking about earlier a bunch earlier a bunch of times it's so necessary for growth and to learn how to manage our stress now is going to help us work optimally and be like smart adults and I think also the stress we feel as a community forces us to not focus so much on being the best at a specific thing but finding what makes us interesting and unique that is different and you can't really compare those things so I think that's really important and I'm going to do this last slide really really fast I promise okay so this is just a little bit about like myself um also I didn't talk about this in this okay maybe it's not going to be um when I was living in Norwood I felt very um like at the top of academics and school work and then moving here obviously a lot of people care a lot and there's a lot of motivation and I think that's a great thing but for me it was a bit overwhelming and still is sometimes to have um so many people who are so competitive because I just wasn't really used to having that competition I guess but it motivates you to work even harder and then here more recently I wasn't doing my extracurriculars like I had been before because I wanted to focus solely on school and this was actually pretty detrimental for my um like functionality because I felt overwhelmed with schoolwork and even though I had more time it really didn't feel like it was making a difference and the second I went back to ballet and started practicing more consistently I felt like my routine was helping me maximize my time even better and I've been really working on maximizing my time planning ahead all these things and also rewarding myself even in really busy times taking breaks is important and breaks provide so much relief and it's really important to include them because they help avoid burnout and I think honestly that is one of the most important things when it comes to setting yourself up for success okay this is my presentation I hope you enjoyed