Spending time alone can be relaxing, but it can be hard to do when there are so many other things to do.
By Alexis Letang
College students want to relax, but there are many expectations placed on them that make it hard to do so.
Third-year, Isabella Morden-Wheeldon said when she talks to other people around her age, they say how hard it can be to designate time for yourself.
“I think a lot of people do feel bad for just, like, taking time to themselves,” she said.
Morden-Wheeldon is a journalism student, who has class Monday through Thursdays from morning until mid-afternoon. She also has a part-time job at a gym daycare where she works a couple days of the week and on the weekends.
She tries to find time on the weekend to relax, but she usually uses that time to go out with her friends. After classes during the week, she spends most of her time studying or doing homework.
Aheed Atif, a first-year linguistics and anthropology major, said he tries to de-stress by going on walks, but it is still hard to actually relax.
“There’s always that bigger, bigger thing on my mind, which I need to take care of,” he said. Right now, that bigger thing is often his writing intensive class.
Mariann Johnson, a mindfulness and wellbeing instructor at the Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality and Healing, said it can be hard for people to relax because the human brain has a tendency to focus or go towards negativity.
Johnson said it is important during stressful times to acknowledge that the body gathers information from sensory nerves, processes and responds to them — the central nervous system.
The body knows how to get a person out of trouble, or upregulate, as Johnson said. The body also knows how to downregulate, or handle stress.
“Our central nervous system is our friend,” Johnson said.
To handle stress, Johnson said, it is important to know what triggers stress and how those triggers can be unconsciously activated. For some people, it is scrolling through social media or talking to certain people.
Managing stress doesn’t mean never going on social media or not talking to people who cause stress, it means limiting the amount of time spent doing that, Johnson said.
Johnson said there is no “one-size fits all” solution to relaxing, because everyone is different. People should think about what brings them a sense of contentment, she said.
For some people, talking to a pet about what is stressing them out keeps their stress levels low, Johnson said. For others, doing an activity, such as cooking or baking, can get a person out of their head and focus less on what they should be doing or need to do.
Morden-Wheeldon said she thinks people around her age feel that if they are going to relax, they need to do it in a way that is aesthetically pleasing or productive. For her, drawing and listening to music, while it may not be traditionally productive, she said it is productive for her well-being.
But she thinks it is more important that the mind and body feel rested.