Sometimes life can get too stressful, and that’s without a global pandemic and social justice movement going on. We have so much going on in our day to day lives that it can all just feel like too much. In the past few months, I have noticed a positive change in my life and my mindset. I rarely get stressed anymore, and I’m all-around a happier person. I’ve realized that making just a few adjustments can lead to a major change in the life that we live, so I would like to share just a few of the changes that I made with anyone else looking to improve their mindset. I’m not a professional, but I can tell you what worked for me.
- Asking for Help
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This may seem like a small thing, but feelings of confusion and helplessness can add so much stress and exhaustion to your life. There are so many people around us and the services offered to us to help us when we need it. We should never be ashamed to ask for help! Whether that be emailing your teachers when there’s something you don’t understand, seeing a therapist, or going to the school’s counseling center, getting a tutor, or even just asking a family member. Someone is there and wants to help you. Finally asking for help made a huge positive change in my life. Personally, I didn’t get diagnosed with ADHD until months into my senior year of high school because I was too scared to ask for help before that. I struggled with my work for so long when a trip to the doctor’s office to tell her what was going on was all I needed. Sitting in confusion by yourself is an unnecessary stressor in your life that you can easily eliminate. Nobody else expects you to know the answer to everything, so you shouldn’t hold yourself to that expectation either!
- Routine and Planning
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Having a routine and planning my days is probably what helped me improve my life the most. We have so much going on in so many different parts of our life, it can be so stressful thinking about everything we have to do. Planning out your days beforehand can help you clear your mind and think about things other than what’s stressing you out. There are so many ways to establish a routine; currently, I have a whiteboard for my morning, exercise, and cleaning routines, and a planner for my school assignments.
Every Monday, I go through all of my classes, checking assignments, and due dates. I figure out what assignments have top priority and what assignments can wait. I put the due dates into the monthly spread of my planner, and then I put each individual assignment into the weekly spread. On my whiteboard, I always have my morning routine and then I decide which days I want to exercise, clean, and do laundry. Doing these things helps me know what I need to do each day, as well as spread my work throughout the week evenly so that I don’t feel like I have so much to do in one day. This system not only helps me establish a daily routine, but it also helps me avoid procrastinating. Before my planner, I would do the easy stuff first, and my top priority assignments would get left to do right before the due date.
While I only use my planner for school assignments and appointments, you can add in any exercise plans or plans with friends, and you can color-code it to make it more organized. Because of my planner, I usually end up having Friday, Saturday, and Sunday work free, and that definitely helps me live a happier life. Whatever you do, just having everything down in writing can relieve so much stress for you, just like it did for me.
- Changing Your Perception
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This one is definitely easier said than done and took much longer to accomplish than the others, but its impacts were probably the greatest. This is going to mean something different for everyone; it’s all about acknowledging your flaws and noticing what aspects of your mindset make you unhappy. What changing my perception meant for me was understanding that nobody else is judging me as hard as I judge myself and that as long as I’m happy and not hurting anyone, then other people’s opinions of me don’t matter. It was a long process to truly believe those things, but telling them to myself enough really worked. Five years ago, I would never be able to do the things that I do now because I was always so worried about what other people would think. Now, I just do what makes me happy, carefree. Being able to do that is one of the best feelings in the world, and well worth the effort that I put into getting here.
Eliminating the unnecessary stressors in my life has made me an inexplicably happier person. I know I only offered a few suggestions, but I hope that they can give you any sort of insight on how to make similar changes in your life! Stress is all about the response, and whenever you decide to change how you respond to things that make you feel stressed, you’re allowing yourself to live a happier life.