Academic Life: Stress and Self-Care

How well do you deal with change and ambiguity? Some people are blessed with the skillset to go with the flow and readily adapt as needed.  If you're like me, though, you prefer structure, clear directions, and to know what to expect in any given situation.  Unfortunately, life doesn't always offer us the consistency and clarity that we might want.  Change happens.  What's that old adage...The only constant in life is that everything changes?  As we continue through the pandemic and deal with changing expectations at work, in class, and out in the world, it's important to have some skills to help us cope with the unknown.  So, here are a few things that I hope you'll find helpful: Will it matter in 5 years?  If it won't matter in 5 years, don't waste energy railing and fighting against the tide. Are you practicing self-care?  Taking care of yourself can help you take care of others when dealing with change.  It also can help to keep you from overreacting to

  How many matches do you have today?  Did you wake up fully recharged and ready to tackle your day?  Or, was it more of a struggle to get out of bed, a tired that not even caffeine could fix?  Each day is a new day, but not all days are created equal.  Some days we get a great night's sleep and can accomplish all of the things on our to do list with grace and ease.  Other days.... sigh.  We may not even have the energy to truly care about much of anything.  Either way this is perfectly normal. A very wise man once explained it to me like this - we are all given a set of matches each day to use however we need to.  Some days we have more matches than we need to get through our day and can invest our extra energy into perusing fun and tackling projects. And, on other days, we are handed a matchbook with only a few matches to use.  They may not even be enough to get through everything we need to; but, that's where we are.  Ultimately, we don't really get a say in how many mat

  So, we've all heard that adults need on average around 8 hours of sleep per night.  But, how many of us actually accomplish that on a regular basis?  It's way too easy to get distracted with social media, hanging out with friends, and enjoying life.  That's not even including the time we spend taking care of ourselves, our living space, and our families each night.  In fact a study by the National Sleep Foundation (2011) reported that only about 63% of Americans say they're getting enough sleep during the week, and 15% of adults aged 19-64 reported getting less than six hours of sleep each night.  So, we're not great at getting enough sleep on a regular basis.  What impact does this actually have?   Sleep plays a major function in memory by allowing the brain to convert short-term memory into long-term memory.  That's like clearing the cache on a computer.  Mass and Robbins (2011) point out that the final two hours of sleep (hours 5.5 to 7 or hours 7-9) are cr