Senior year is definitely taking its toll on me, and it’s only the third week!

Lately I’ve been feeling kind of rushed. Everything has been kind of thrown at me. And I don’t know how to manage everything yet. It’s not easy juggling six classes, writing for a newspaper, applying to graduate schools and finding time to have a social life, plus, the pressure of graduating on time is just another weight to add on my shoulders. Also, I’m sorry to say that the stress factor is only going to get much worse once we graduate, or so I’ve been told. Once we walk across that stage to receive our diploma after awkwardly shaking the President’s sweaty hand, the stress doesn’t go out the door. If we thought sitting through a three hour lecture once a week was a bitch, imagine how hard the real world is going to be? I think I’m going through a senior year crisis.

Okay, that’s just a fancier way to say that I’m stressed out. I never thought senior year was going to be this stressful until the idea of going back to school after a long summer vacation hit me like a ton of bricks. Senior year was supposed to be a walk through the park. Everything is supposed to be light and easy going with my main concern being getting out and graduating. Clearly, that was a lie. Who knew senior year would be this hard?

I’m not writing this to complain and whine about how difficult of a time I’m having trying to sort everything out so I can hopefully graduate in May. I know there are plenty of other seniors who are scrambling to manage to do the same thing. The last thing any of us want to become is a weird super-senior who hangs out around Victory all day playing pool with a bunch of underclassmen.

Stress is pretty common in college students. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, more than 40% of college students have felt more than an average amount of stress within the past 12 months.

It’s completely normal to be stressed out, but stress isn’t going to magically go away. If you don’t do anything about it, it’s just going to get worse and it’ll start to affect you even more. Here are some ways to deal with your stress:

Go to the gym. Work the stress out!

Find a way to manage all of your time so that you can get your work done. Stay in on the weekend to catch up on some work. Instead of hanging out with your friends Saturday night and then rushing to finish your work with a hangover the following morning, try giving yourself an extra day to do your work. Even if you manage to get most of it done Saturday morning and want to go out that night, at least you won’t be stressing yourself out the next day to finish everything.

Keep a positive attitude, take a deep breath and suck it up! Whining and crying about how stressed out you are isn’t going to fix anything. And no one wants to keep hearing about how stressed out you are, we’re all stressed out, so hearing you cry about it makes you annoying.

Talk to someone. Maybe you need a good venting session, or maybe you just need to know that someone is there to have your back when things aren’t going so smoothly.

Maybe, just maybe, we’ll all be able to graduate this year without having to see a therapist. For now, just keep hanging on. We’ll get through this, one stressful situation at a time.

And that is how you solve a problem like Maria. Stay stress free my friends.