UMAT - Stress Management
The student undertaking final high school exams during year 12 will have additional pressure placed on them to perform well in the UMAT. As you are probably well aware by now, preparation is a vital component in UMAT success. However, preparation requires the student’s time – time which is unwillingly donated to UMAT prep during stressful last minute study periods before the ever frequent school exams.
A multitude of factors can contribute to a student’s stress and anxiety during this time:
- relationships
- employment
- pressures from family
- their health
- the standards they set for themselves
- insecurities, doubts and fears
Apart from a number of psychological consequences that intense stress can cause, the physical effects, such as migraine, hypertension, constipation and insomnia, can be debilitating to the student.
Stress is self-perpetuating, causing an increasing influence on your mind and body, until it controls all your thoughts, feelings and actions. The cause behind stress is biological: when a person is placed in a hostile situation, the body is placed in a state of ‘fight or flight’, preparing to either stay and fight or evacuate the situation immediately. The body undergoes a series of biochemical changes: adrenaline is released, blood pressure increases, heart rate increases, blood flow to the gastrointestinal tract gets shunted towards skeletal muscle. These responses prepare the body for ‘fight or flight’.
However there does not necessarily need to be a confrontation with an adversary or an environmental danger to activate the ‘fight or flight’ mechanism. The simplest mistake, conflict or misfortune (such as sleeping through your alarm clock, spilling a drink onto your shirt, or if someone is being rude) can cause the body to undergo identical episodes.
Simply fulfilling one of the two options – fight or flight – would resolve your stress very quickly. However it is difficult to do this if you have to sit behind your desk and study, or if you have to stay in your seat until the class is over. Your body is ready to fight or flee and all that you can do in this situation is stay still and agonise. This allows your stress to build, and we can now see why it can sometimes escalate to levels that are seemingly impossible to control.
Eliminating Stress from Your Life
Sometimes it is not easy to drastically adjust your lifestyle to an extent that is required to lead a stress-free life. You might not be prepared to drop out of high school, to leave home and go bush, or to leave your girlfriend. You might also not be prepared to exercise regularly, eat healthily, and to get enough sleep each night. However there are simpler ways of reducing stress in your life. It is possible to calmly face a huge study load with an awareness of the limited time you have available.
Look into different meditating techniques and practice the ones which you believe work best for you. You should focus on calming your mind, which will coincidentally calm your body. There are numerous studies which suggest that your psychological state has a direct influence on your general health. An anxious, negative mental state inhibits the body’s immune responses, making the body more susceptible to ill health and slowing healing processes.
Benefits of stress Reduction
Stress reduction will have considerable benefits on your lifestyle, such as:
- A more positive attitude
- Happiness and willingness to enjoy life more
- Greater tolerance levels
- An improvement in diet, sleep and your relationships with others
- An increase in mental alertness, allowing you to think more creatively
Invest 15-20 minutes of your day in relaxing your mind and body – this will enable you to concentrate on your studies for longer periods of time with much more efficient results.
Stress management is a long-term process. Calming techniques may give temporary relief but to achieve long-lasting results, it is important to persistently practice the techniques.
Even after the day-to-day improvements don’t seem quite as noticeable after some time, it is necessary for you to be determined. When you get the temptation to take it easy for a while, take a little break and you will notice how much the exercises were benefiting you. However this will make it harder for you to get back into the routine as you will be starting from the beginning.
If you choose to persevere through this period you will find that it is easier and quicker for you to reach the state of calmness every time you practice the techniques. Any meditation works by the principle: you will become good at what you practice. If you ‘practice’ living in a stressful state, you will be stressful. If you make an effort to practice being calm, you will feel a lot calmer. The goal is to make the effort and persist with it.
As you practice relaxation techniques you will begin to feel much more relaxed, more able to cope with daily problems and conflicts, and you will have a greater capacity to enjoy your life. You will recognise that you are becoming more creative, that you have more energy, better health and a deeper understanding of yourself. You will be more in tune with your life and how you relate to others and different situations.
How meditation affects the body
- Your metabolism is affected – thus it is best not to meditate straight after eating a meal
- Your oxygen consumption decreases and your body produces less carbon monoxide
- Heart beat and respiration rate decrease considerably
- Lactate level in your bloodstream decreases dramatically (lactate is produced when the ‘fight or flight’ response is activated and contributes to stress and anxiety
- Decrease in blood pressure, and an increase in the electrical resistance of your skin
Meditation aims to place you in a state of deep relaxation where your mind is wide awake and alert. There is a change in your brainwave pattern, with an increase of slow alpha waves (present when you are alert and relaxed), and a presence of delta waves (which occur in the deepest sleep). Thus your brain is highly alert but in deep relaxation.
It might be difficult to believe that simple mental techniques can achieve great results in calming your stress. However as you become familiar with practicing relaxation techniques you will begin to appreciate that calmness is easily attainable.
After 15-20 minutes of meditation your body undergoes processes which are opposite to the ones you experience when you are feeling anxious or tense. In effect, the stress process becomes reversed, as your metabolic rate changes, your lactate levels drop, and your skin increases in electrical resistance - and all this results from a state of deep relaxation together with high mental alertness.
All meditation techniques focus on bringing your attention to performing one single thing at a time with all your effort. When you become good at this you will learn to centre your complete attention. Thus meditating techniques help you to focus. This helps to produce a balance in your state of mind, as well as increasing your thinking, concentrating and comprehending abilities.
If you examine your thought pattern while you are in a state of anxiety, you will notice that your thoughts come to you faster, you remember the past with sadness and worry about the future, and this only gets worse if you try to stop thinking. Your anxiety levels increase until you are in a state of utter panic. Your thoughts become disoriented and you are unable to go to sleep, eat, or get anything done.
It would be much easier for you to focus on one thing at a time, without distraction, without worrying about what you will do tomorrow or reflecting on what you did yesterday. It would be much easier if you could concentrate. The closest you could get to not having anything on your mind is having only one thing on your mind. If you stop the restless thinking process, your mind is no longer preoccupied with unnecessary junk and only your alertness remains.
When you have gained control of your mind you will be able to achieve great things. When you allow your mind to control you, it manipulates with your emotions, through your ego and your emotions. Through relaxation techniques you are able to quiet your mind and increase your consciousness.
Your ability to concentrate will increase the efficiency of your thinking, your understanding, and your ability to differentiate fantasy from reality.
Training your mind
You might think it is easy to think of only one thing for a long period of time. Try it only for a couple minutes and you will soon realise how it is almost impossible. This can be achieved if your mind is trained. It is even possible to train your mind to the point where you never have to think about thinking, and you can focus your consciousness on ‘being’.
One of the biggest problems you will come to face is overcoming impatience, due to our significantly reduced attention spans, and our ability to persist with an action has been affected. You must not expect immediate results. You must realise your desire to improve but also have the willingness to persist with the techniques. You will soon find out that relaxation techniques are of most benefit for those who are dedicated and persist with regular practice.
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