Money. Grades. Pleasing your parents. Getting your kids to stop crying. Impressing your coach. Seeing your boyfriend who lives three hours away.
We all have stress in our lives.
But stress only affects you as much as you allow it to.
Last semester was my first semester in college. My parents and boyfriend dropped me off with all of the other incoming freshmen. I fit in instantly. We were all a bunch of little high schoolers who knew of the school we were attending — but we had not yet learned our place in the little town of Due West that we now call home.
I could tell by looking at the faces around me that the other girls were stressed.
There were some (like me) who were so incredibly excited to finally be at college. They were ready for their families to leave so that they could be on their own. No more curfew, no more waking up at 7:30 a.m. every day to get to school before the tardy bell rang, no more having to ask permission to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom and no more having to ask their parents if they could go out with their friends or their boyfriends.
Then there were the ones (also me) who didn’t want their families to leave. They didn’t want to lose the comfort of knowing their places; they didn’t want to have to remember that there would be no more home-cooking from their moms, no more driving to their best friends' houses whenever they just wanted to spend the night and no more driving over to Grandma's to cry in her arms as she spoke Jesus’ wisdom into their broken hearts.
The stress set in, one way or another, and it was there. For the rest of the semester, we were figuring out which group of friends we fit with and figuring out whom we could call our best friends.
Somewhere between the beginning of first semester and the end of first semester, I learned of a little thing called “eustress,” aka “good stress” or “positive stress.” Eustress is stress that motivates you to do better. It provides mental alertness, it pushes you to meet deadlines (especially for those pesky Dr. Little papers) and it encourages you to reach your goals and shoot for more. (Props to Coach Peeler for teaching me that.)
I soon realized that I was taking my stress more seriously that I should have been. I wasn’t allowing myself to have that positive stress to enable me to do more and do better. The stress of trying to type a perfect paper, get athletic training hours in, spend time with friends, get home to see my family and friends, see my boyfriend, make A’s and B’s — all while trying not to gain the famous freshman 15 and achieve what is so foreign to all college students: sleep. (I failed miserably at bypassing the freshman 15 and getting a sufficient amount of sleep. It’s inevitable.) The stress was getting the best of me and I didn’t know how to let it affect me positively. So, like my Grandma always said, I turned to Jesus.
- Proverbs 16:3, “Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed.”
- Proverbs 16:9, “In his heart a man plans his course, but the Lord determines his steps.”
- Jeremiah 17: 7-8, “But blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. He will be like a tree planted by the water and sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.”
- Matthew 11:28-30, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
- Matthew 6:25-27, “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?”
- Psalm 34: 17-19, “The righteous cry out, and the Lord hears them; he delivers them from all their troubles. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit. A righteous man may have many troubles, but the Lord delivers him from them all.”
- Isaiah 40: 30-31, “Even youths grow tired and weary, and young men stumble and fall; but those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”
Although the seven verses above were my some of my biggest guidelines throughout my first semester of college, they are not the only thing that helped me get through. Talking to Jesus throughout each day, and Facetime calls with my Grandma were significant in my de-stressing day to day.
“The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” — William James
