The life lessons are just coming at me like whoa right now! It's pretty awesome. It makes me feel wise and mature and whatnot.
Today I learned about stress in my organization behavior class. I can explain to you how your eyes send not one but two signals to your brain. One for your brain to process what you're seeing and the other to your amygdala (yes I now know what an amygdala is) which is part of your emotional response center (limbic system). Basically, the point is that your body reacts to something before your brain really comprehends what is going on. Kind of cool huh?
I also learned our limbic system (emotions) are the first thing to develop after our brain stem. Everything we learn is connected to our emotions. Our frontal lobe (our rationality) does not even fully develop until we are in our 20s! So basically, humans are emotional beings. I suppose that means Bones (one of my favorite shows) is a fallacy, but I guess I'm ok with that.
Basically, we are all cavemen. When we encounter stress we react with our fight or flight gotta run away or kill the deadly saber-tooth tiger response. Our ancient survival instincts still kick in when we are stressed even though the situation is completely different these days. I don't remember the last time I was mauled by a tiger anyways! Instead we have a bombardment of low-grade stresses, but we still have the survival instinct reaction anyways. Stress is only a physical reaction to a (this is important) PERCEIVED loss of control. Rarely when we finally calm down and put things into perspective, was the situation even close to what our reaction was.
And (now this is scientifically proven people) stress makes you unhealthy! It makes you sick, dumb, irrational, achy, tense, etc. Dare I say that stress also makes you completely miserable (in my experience anyways).
Sometimes, as a graduate student I feel guilty about putting aside work I know I should be doing to have fun, exercise, cook, watch a movie, etc. However, today I learned that I need to get over that nonsense. I always knew it was good to set aside time for exercise and eating and the essentials, but I just can't help but beat myself up about doing something fun when I know there is so much school work to be done. Even during the fun I had this weekend, I always kept thinking in the back of my mind that I should be doing homework. But by golly wouldn't you know, my happy fun times were justified in class today.
As a matter of fact, when you are feeling the most stressed is the time when you most need to step away from the situation and gain some perspective. I need to remind myself that while school is important right now, it is not all there is. As a matter of fact, in the long run school is relatively unimportant.
So the point of this:
We can't avoid stress. BUT we can learn to deal with it. As a matter of fact, I think maybe part of our test in this life is to learn to control stress.
(I promise I'll try to think of something more fun to write about soon. Like perhaps how I left my phone on silent this morning and woke up at 7:45 and had to be at school at 8 or how despite the fact Zumba gives me a good workout I don't think I will ever be a good dancer :(, or how I thought I lost my iPod today, or how my team got reamed in front of the entire econ class and I almost lost it in classic Rachel the Big Mouth style, or how I got so upset on Sunday because someone started playing Christmas music that all I could do was stick a pillow over my face at someone else's apartment and be so miserable that I started cracking up and couldn't regain composure for a few minutes and how it was exacerbated by people putting more pillows on my face, or how I now laugh every time I hear the phrase golden arches, or how I booked a hostel 0.3 miles from where I'll be staying next week in D.C. for Saturday night before the rest of the group gets there and how they supposedly provide free walking tours, or how I'm really excited to go get Indian food with my friends from Africa on Thursday night, or how much I love the movie Despicable Me, or my rediscovered love of the Weepies, or how I get to see Anthony Green on Friday night, or how ridiculously excited I am to go home in just less than two weeks . . . well you get the point.)
But isn't life wonderful?!
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