Life of every student is full of stress. It does not matter if you are an excellent student or an average one. You feel emotional tension while visiting lectures, writing your essays, preparing for exams, solving personal troubles, planning your future. It is not that easy to keep your mind under control all the time.
But it is necessary. Uncontrolled emotions can distract you from studying, can do harm to your relations with teachers and groupmates, and influence your grades and future reputation. It is possible to hold back strong emotions.
You only need to know how to deceive your body.
1. Dip Your Head in Cold Water
Fill the sink with cold water, add some ice cubes, hold your breath, dip your head in there and keep it in the water for 15-30 seconds. This will calm you down and sweep excessive worries out of your mind instantly.
No breathing and dipping the face into cold water activates a diver’s reflex. This evolutionary mechanism is called to save your life when you get trapped under ice or water. At critical moments your pulse frequency lowers, and the oxygen is directed to the most important organs: your brain and your heart.
To keep the energy, your organism switches off all unnecessary functions and thoughts, including negative emotions.
You can use a cooling pack of gel too. Just get it out of the fridge when the time comes, hold your breath, and hold it up to your face.
2. Chill Off
If you don’t want to wet your head, find some ice and hold it in your hand until it hurts. This does not activate the diver’s reflex, but helps your organism to feel pain and produce endorphins as a reaction. You’ll feel ease or even euphoria after throwing the ice out of your hand.
3. Breathe as If You Blew Soap Bubbles
You need to slow down your pulse to calm down. It is always synchronized with your breathing. Your heart beats faster when you breathe in and slower when you breathe out. Try making your breath-outs longer than your breath-ins as soon as you feel you lose control over your emotions.
Breathe out longer and slower as if you blew soap bubbles. Children know that the slower they blow bubbles out, the bigger they’ll be. Things work the same way here. Blow some “bubbles”. And then, feel that your heartbeat getting slower. That’s how you can manage to calm down.
4. Do the Opposite Thing
If you want to stay in the warm bed, get up and go take a shower. If you’re sad, turn on the music and dance. If you’re irritated, hold the door for a person behind you. Act not in the way your emotions tell you to act, do opposite things. This will work as mood and behavior depend on one another.
Change your behavioral strategy and your mood will change too.
The opposite action works in case your emotions are irrational: for instance, when you feel unprotected or anxious. Ask yourself when you are afraid of being rejected. Go ahead if you are sure about defeat. But do not try going through if someone insults or humiliates you at university, this won’t work.
5. Meditate
Strong emotions are like waves: they appear, fall down on you, and then go away. People are often afraid of getting influenced by the waves of anger, pain or sadness, and they try to escape from these waves. To get rid of sufferings, people drink, overeat, or break bad.
Emotions come from your body: sadness is a paradoxical mix of heaviness and emptiness. Anger is a tension and fire in your chest. Shame is the strong will to hide. No matter how difficult it is, learn to detect emotions on your body level. This will help you go through even the strongest storms.
You can master this skill with the help of meditation or consciousness. You can meditate while sitting, walking, cleaning your house, studying, or listening to music. Practice directing your attention without judging. Finally, you’ll learn to detect your emotions and to control them.
And while you are meditating and putting your thoughts in order, our professional essay writers can do some college assignments for you. Why waste your nerves on the things you, speaking frankly, don’t like?