How to Stop Worrying and Stressing about School

Hey, it's Joey and welcome to Better Ideas!

So, final exam season isn't quite here yet, but it's just around the corner. Students everywhere are just weeks away from entering crunch time, where all hell breaks loose, all-nighters are pulled, etc., etc.

Anyways, one of the worst possible things you can do in a situation like this, or any other similar stressful situation, is worry. Worrying is bad; it's completely useless. It doesn't do anything for you. It causes you to not think straight.

Needless to say, it should be systematically eliminated from your life. Of course, worrying is natural, and we can't really stop it from happening to us every once in a while, no matter who you are. But when it does, you need to learn how to control it. See through the fog of worry and take action on the things that you need to do with a clear head.

So, without further ado, this is based off of Dale Carnegie's book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. Here are three awesome tips to help you eliminate worry in any given situation, not just finals.

Step 1: Ask yourself, "What is the worst thing that could possibly happen if I don't solve my problems?" Say it's Sunday afternoon and you realize that you just wasted away the entirety of the weekend doing nothing. In the upcoming week, you have five final humungous papers due.

So, the worst possible outcome in a situation like this is to show up to your class, or all of your classes, completely empty-handed, and your professor’s to deduct 20, 25% or whatever your final paper's worth in that class. Really visualize this happening. Can you picture it?

Step number 2: Prepare yourself to accept the worst, if necessary. So, pretend this actually happened to you. You made it through the entire week without handing a single assignment in. You're home for the summer, your grades start rolling in, and you notice that for every single one of the classes that you didn't hand the final paper in, you're getting one, two letter grades lower than you thought you would get in that class.

What you thought would be A's and B's are now C's and D's. So, take a deep breath and mentally picture those seasoned D's on your transcript. Accept that it actually happened. You don't have to like it, just accept it.

Step number 3: Calmly try to improve upon the worst, which you've already mentally accepted. Now that you've already visualized and accepted the worst possible outcome, calmly try to improve upon it, worry-free.

Take the assignment that's due first, start chipping away at it, drink a nice herbal tea, put your mind at ease, and slowly make that 0% paper that you've already accepted into a 15% paper. Then write some more words, blurb something out until it's a D-minus paper. Even if that's as far as you get and you make one passable paper out of your five papers, you've already accepted that you weren't gonna do any of them, so in comparison, that's awesome.

You see, by doing this, you're tricking your brain into being productive with a clear head, just focusing on the task at hand. You're changing your chaotic panic scenario into one of worry-free and blissful clear-headed productivity.

Now, which headspace do you think produces better writing? Comment below which one! I'm just kidding; that's an easy question! I used paper writing as an example for this worry-eliminating strategy, but it can really be translated to any area of your life.

Review next time you're on the verge of a mental breakdown, and it feels like your world’s falling apart around you. Ask yourself, "What is the worst possible thing that could possibly happen if I don't solve my problem?" Then prepare yourself to accept the worst, if necessary. Then calmly try to improve upon the worst, which you've already mentally agreed to accept.

If you follow these three steps, you'll be way more relaxed and clear-headed in any high-stakes scenario. That's a good thing!

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