With the school year in full swing, it can be hard to find happiness with the mountain of work and relentless woes of meeting deadlines and sacrificing sleep. However, stressing over school work doesn’t have to be a bad experience! Here are three ways to be happy in a school system that pits you against your friends in a ruthless rat race at the expense of your mental health and also with no regard for you as a human being.
- Meditation: If you ever have at least ten minutes or so in a busy day, then I suggest meditation as a way to relieve school-induced stress. Meditation is an ancient practice that can be about many things, but the one we are focusing on today is the Buddhist version. I learned from my family, which is a focus on an absence of thought. All you have to do is sit down, in preferably a dark room, and focus on your breathing. Just focus on the rhythm and count of your breath and you will feel immediate calm. If you ever start to stray from breathing due to the impending deadlines you have and intense guilt you face from not doing enough work, then just count your breathing again. If you find the inability to calm your mind due to the intense academic pressures of school requiring you to juggle learning multiple topics at once, then just start over with counting your breath once more! Soon enough you will empty your mind and achieve relaxation.
- Exercise: Doing any exercise such as running, doing activities at the gym, or maybe even basic calisthenic exercises at home (like sit-ups, push-ups, etc.) can do wonders for your brain’s dopamine production. This dopamine production can in-turn decrease stress! However, finding time to exercise can be difficult for the busy student. All you have to do is set aside 30 minutes to an hour everyday to devote yourself to basic exercises and you can experience this stimulating practice. All you have to do is check your busy schedule, maybe throw in an hour a day, and ignore the exhaustion you feel from not just doing schoolwork, but by thinking about it on a daily basis! If you just ignore the exhaustion, then you can even do a few sit-ups and push-ups, before laying back and wondering why you suffer so much from existing.
- Just be Happy: Like the famous saying goes, “If you’re ever sad, then just be happy!” This opinion isn’t reductive and ignorant of human facilities at all, it just points out a solution to any form of sadness. Just don’t be sad! My parents and teachers always tell me to not be sad all the time, and it really helps to know that there’s such as easy solution out there. It’s such an easy solution it’ll make you go: “Why didn’t I think of that?” Well it's because by experiencing high school in the 1980’s, your Gen. X/Boomer parents have automatically become qualified to give perfect advice about high school in the modern day, despite the vast differences between their time and our time.