Stress Relief for Finals Week

As hard as it may be to believe, but finals week is finally here. It’s that time of the year to test yourself on how much you actually learned these past 15 weeks. While 15 weeks of school work boiled down to 1 test may be stressful, Global Ed has some sure-fire ways to help ease some of this test anxiety you may feel!

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  • Do NOT procrastinate – if you have not started studying yet, take this weekend to begin. Even if your test is not cumulative, it is still overwhelming for your brain to absorb information for multiple classes at once. Prioritize your studying based on which tests are first, and develop a study plan to help ease some stress.
  • Eat regularly/healthy – fueling your body with healthy food also fuels your brain, which helps you retain information while you study. It is easy to forge to eat when you get weighed down with tasks/studying, and often it is easier to engorge in 3 pizzas a day or have coffee for dinner. While cooking may take some time, it is important to make sure that you are getting your normal vitamins through your food. This will not not only help with studying, but healthy eating will prevent you from getting sick – which you run a higher risk of when you are stressed out.
  • Take a break – After about 60-90 minutes of studying, your brain stops retaining information. It is important to give yourself a break. During your break, doing light exercise helps with studying too! Take a short walk and enjoy the fresh air and sunshine, take a break and make a meal, or just relax for about 10 minutes in silence. Whatever you need to do to give your brain the well needed rest it deserves is just as important as studying.
  • Sleep – sleep is very important and correlates directly with academic performance. Your body needs rest, and getting a healthy 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep per night is vital to college students well-being. Feeling rested when you wake up will help you perform better on your tests and assignments.
  • Breathe – Sure, you breathe all the time. But when is the last time you stopped what you were doing, took a deep breath in, and then just let it go? It is amazing how satisfying and relieving this can be. If you find yourself overwhelmed, remember to just breathe. School work and finals are very important, but they are not the end-all, be-all of your life. Everyone is human and we are not expected to get perfect scores on all of our tests. We are expected to try our best and learn what we can. At the end of the day, if you try your best and give it your all, that is succeeding. Finals will be over before you know it and then we get to enjoy 3 months of a well deserved summer vacation!