Recently, I have been feeling drained: midterm season has officially arrived, I am traveling frequently and not sleeping enough. Last week, I felt guilty when my 30-minute nap became two hours — I’m sure you know that as college students, this is not a rare occurrence. In my exhausted state, I received a simple, yet extremely helpful tip from a friend.
Simply, she said: in that moment, there was nowhere you needed to be and nothing else you needed to do. Accept the relaxation in the moment.
This mindset is a classic example of mindfulness: keeping one’s attention focused and centered on the present moment. Its benefits include reduced stress and better physical health, both of which are essential to maintaining a life constantly on-the-go. In college, this practice is heavily underutilized.
In mindfulness, the emphasis is placed on disconnecting from stressors and focusing instead on what is happening in that moment. Many of the practices include deep breathing, engagement of the five senses and creating acceptance. As students with full class schedules, internships, work and sports, our attention is focused on where we need to be or what we need to be doing next. The school environment is one that fosters stress right alongside with productivity.
Many students, myself included, struggle with anxiety. Anxiety drives one’s thoughts to be focused on the future, which builds up stress to an uncomfortable level. Mindfulness serves to ground me back to the present and lowers my stress from factors out of my control.
We are all subject to distractions, stress and anxiety; it is honestly inevitable. However, during extended periods of time under stress, the body remains connected to the sympathetic nervous system, the part of the brain that activates a heightened state of arousal during a fight-or-flight response. Awareness of one’s surroundings is driven up, but as a survival mechanism, anxiety increases as well. This is counterproductive to completing the things that are causing us stress in the first place.
By using deep breathing, an individual can change their own body’s functioning by dropping into the parasympathetic nervous system, a state of rest and relaxation. Spending more time in the parasympathetic nervous system allows an individual to be more productive due to feeling more calm. This equates to studying more efficiently with less wasted time due to anxiety-driven struggles with concentration. As a result, you will have more time to do things that are unrelated to schoolwork.
Living in the present can be tough to do when there is a checklist of tasks that need to be completed all in one day. It is more common to walk through a dorm and see people procrastinating than actually doing homework at the end of the day. I am guilty as well, but if we can devote time to Instagram and Facebook, we can spend time caring for our own health as well. It seems simple, but it is by no means an easy practice. Start by spending just five minutes at the beginning of each day experiencing living in the moment; the benefits may surprise you.
Kara Bilello is a sophomore majoring in English.