Stress can tear a person apart. If you let stress control your life, it will slowly start to eat away at you until you no longer recognize yourself. This has been my experience with stress for almost as long as I can remember. I would consider myself to be a very happy and enthusiastic person, but when things start to get crazy, I am the first person to experience stress. I also tend to stress over things that most likely will never happen. So this first year of being as college, and of being an adult on my own has pushed me to the edge. But here is what I have learned from it.
1. Most of the things we stress about don’t actually matter in the long run.
Just this past week, I was worrying about a potential conflict with my work schedule and my volleyball schedule, and I was letting the stress just eat me apart. I came in for workouts and my coach could tell that I was stressing about something. He then gave me a talk about how I really need to not stress about the small things that are out of my control. He told me that he has never had a headache in his entire life because he just doesn’t care about the small things. He said other than God, his family, and the people in his life, he just doesn’t care what happens. He said he just trusts that things will work out, and one way or another they always do. And he told me that I have to look at the big picture, and realize that most of the small things that I stress about won’t actually matter in a few years or in the long run.
2. Most of the things we worry about never actually happen.
This one definitely happens to me a ton. During the school year I was always worried that I would do poorly on a test, and end up getting a bad grade, and possibly fail the class, meaning that I wouldn’t get into graduate school, and then I wasn’t going to get a job, which meant that I was going to be living on the streets of New York selling food out of a cart. And all of that random fear came from being worried about one exam. There is actually a statistic that says that 90% of what we worry about never actually happens. So what is the point about stressing over the small things.
3. Stress can have so many damaging effects.
I have had acid reflux since high school, I get awful headaches whenever I’m stressed out, and my blood pressure in technically one number away from being considered high. I have had coaches, friends and family members warn me about how stressed I get because it just isn’t healthy. And I think that I’m finally starting to see the damaging effects on my body and my mind.
So I guess the point of all of this is to encourage all of you to take a hard look at your life, and find out what triggers your stress. Then the next step is to find something that can help relieve that stress. How to deal with stress is different for everyone, but I think the most important thing to remember is that at some point you just have to let go and stop caring. Stop worrying about the small things, and leave it in God’s hands or leave it up to fate depending on what you believe in. Things always somehow work out, even if it’s not in the exact way you wanted it to or you were thinking it would. Life gets crazy, but the quicker you learn to not worry about the small stuff, the better off you will be.
