College aside, I believe life is all about taking whatever comes your way in stride… and then experiencing falls, a LOT. What’s important though is when you trip, that you have the dignity to stand up, brush yourself off, and continue to be a positive light in everyone else’s day.

Understandably, living out this lifestyle with a good attitude at all times seems impossible in college, as bumps in the road could affect your future career, prevent you from taking advantage of opportunities, and even long term relationships. These factors all contribute to one big stress cloud that is constantly looming overhead, and that stress can not only make schoolwork worse, but it can ruin the hobbies, activities, and friendships you love.

Managing stress is important for every aspect of our lives, and for me personally, it holds even greater importance because I strive to be not only a carefree friend, but one who is always there to help the people around me in managing their own stress.

All that being said, I’m going to share some of the ways that I have managed stress, especially as of late with the transition I have had to make as a freshman in college. Before I get into the specifics of how I’ve made this transition, I want to share the NUMBER ONE RULE (and the only concrete rule, really) TO MINIMIZING STRESS:

In everything you do in life, whether it involves friendships, schooling, recreation, and ESPECIALLY your professional life, make sure it all aligns with your core beliefs.

You’ve heard people say not to live split lives with different friends because it will literally tear you apart, but the same is true for everything else in life. When you aren’t devoting your life to a few basic goals, you’ll find that you start to delegate energy. Some of it will go to your family, some to your friends, your social life, a majority will go to work or your student occupation, and then little sliver of time left over (if any) goes to you and the hobbies you enjoy. As you can imagine and may already know from experience, this is a very taxing lifestyle and no matter how much progress you make in one aspect of your life, it simply won’t be able to make up for where you’ve fallen behind elsewhere.

AWESOME advice, I know. An obscure rule that applies to everything, but explains nothing. Bare with me though! I promise I can elaborate and give examples from my own experiences,

After I graduated high school, the idea of college, a future job, a family all became much more realistic than they’d ever been. Like most everyone else my age, I was experience the stress of transitioning to adulthood, and it really freaked me out. I knew what I SAID I was going to do at college and after the fact, but I didn’t REALLY know, nobody can actually predict the future. All throughout my junior and senior year, I’d planned on getting a job writing, but after an internship as a marketing editor the summer after graduation, I realized it wasn’t for me and I now had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with my life.

So I was forced to take a step back and reevaluate my life goals; I thought I knew what I liked, and that was true, I LIKED my internship, but I had no clue what I LOVED. I was yet to find a passion. So I simplified it for myself: rather than try to figure out my life plan, I just decided to determine what I valued most in life, and how I can make that the focus of everything I did.

You can be as successful as you want in every way imaginable, but if you don’t get a fulfillment out of life, you just won’t be happy. So instead of trying to build my life around some job I had never done like before, I committed to building my life around the things that made me happiest: friends, family, children, service, and at the root of it all, my faith.

I’m a Christian, so I value loving other people, spending time building relationships, and serving. After I have acknowledged these values as the core of my person, THEN I start to choose the different ways I’ll spend my time on campus.

Obviously this meant joining a Christian ministry as soon as I got on campus, so I joined Cru! Even if you don’t become best friends with the people in whatever student organization you join, just being around people who share a hobby or passion that you can use to get your mind off of schoolwork for a couple hours a week is immensely helpful.

To keep family and friends from back home as a regular part of my life, I actually scheduled my classes so that I’m getting everything done Monday-Thursday, and I have Friday off. That way, I can take off for a three day weekend with family if I ever need to spend time with them.

To make service a regular part of my weekly routine, I reached out to a daycare just off campus before I even moved in and asked if I could start volunteering a few hours out of the week working with preschoolers. I even managed to find a course that gave credit for volunteering in public and then relating the experience to philosophy in your own life and self-discovery.

All those things are a huge part of me, but the question still remains: what am I going to do when I graduate? Heck, what degree am I going to graduate with?

To be honest, I still don’t really know! At the moment, I’m a English and psychology double major, and I would love to work with children in the future in some way, but I am yet to figure that out. Rather than dwell on the fact that there are a lot of unknowns in my future, I’ve made my perspective one that focuses instead on how I can work towards finding that out, so I’m taking as much of a variety of classes as I can and dedicating my time to the things I already know I love.

Now, I’ve spit out a lot of information, but I guess a good 3 step summary of everything I’ve tried to explain in this post is:

1. Let your values define your passion, not the other way around
2. Never spend your time doing something that isn’t allowing you to live out your values
3. Never neglect the importance of perspective and love in everything you do

My parting words to you are this: if you are struggling with stress, anxiety, and the fear of not knowing that many of us share, redirect your energy towards what you DO know is important to you, and work wholeheartedly at using that experience to make you a better person not in terms of success, but in regards to fulfillment and happiness.