Less Stress: Developing Positive Attitude Towards Homework

Can you help your child and yourself develop a positive attitude to homework? It’ll get possible as soon as you start reducing your stress.

Everybody’s talking about stress nowadays. You’ll come across dozens if not thousands of articles which will provide you with tips on how to deal with anxiety that is crushing you on a daily basis. But do any of those tips really work? And more importantly, what is stress actually?

You see, we have been talking about stressing-out so actively that all of us have absolutely no doubt that this condition of the mind and body is something that we all have and that we need to avoid it as much as possible.

In reality, it`s not ordinarily us, who are so eager to bring up the topic of stress so often. It`s the media.

Personally, I get goosebumps every time I read another article about a college student who can’t deal with piles of home assignments and suffers seriously, without timely college homework help and support.

Newspapers and the Internet are flooded with articles on stress-coping, finding your inner peace and developing a positive attitude.

Wait a minute, isn’t it something that we were going to tell you about? Yes, but we decided to serve it with a very special sauce called “realistic view” and spice it up with real-life facts.

Before we jump straight to scientific tips on dealing with homework overload with the minimum of stress, let`s see why our nervous system seems to collapse from time to time.

Some Words about Stress

A Stress Fraud?

Try to determine how stressed out you`re right now on the scale from one to ten. Are you sure about the number? Our whole society is so worried about many meaningless aspects of life that you can`t help but wonder how come our civilization still exists. Let`s make things clear here.

Yes, stress does exist, and this is a protection mechanism that helps us to survive throughout history. Basically, it was adrenaline and a couple of others super important hormones that have been making our systems ticking all this time.

When a caveman, for example, would see a source of danger like a predator, the adrenaline level in his blood would skyrocket and he would turn on all hidden superpowers.

By the way, you can`t lift a car or jump over a 3-meter fence when adrenaline rushes through your veins. It`s yet another myth.

How about now? We don`t see any kinds of predators around, but we still need adrenaline from time to time because that’s just our physiology. Let’s face it. The modern world is much safer than it used to be even a couple of hundreds of years ago.

We don`t need to run away from wild animals who want to eat us, we don`t have to hunt, and we have even learned how to live peacefully with each other.

Stress is a really big deal. This body condition has two variations. One of them is extremely beneficial for your health and overall wellbeing, and the other one, as you might have already guessed, is extremely harmful. So, what’s the difference?

There is stress of a fleeting type. You feel it when you go in for extreme sports or when you find yourself in a dangerous life-threatening situation. This kind of stress triggers our primal “fight-or-flight” response. This is good stress! Some people even get addicted to adrenaline because they believe it makes them feel more alive.

And there is chronic stress, which has a dramatically negative effect on your health. Many people feel it on a day-to-day basis, no matter the age.

Terrible overwork and homework overload serve as very common reasons. A recent study reported that 60% of workers feel stressed out three and more days per workweek.

This situation may lead to perpetual damage to their mental health. This damage may be represented by depression and severe anxiety.

Before trying to solve any kind of problem, we need to get into its depths and find all possible reasons and factors. Imagine you’ve done it so you know everything. Nobody can tell you that being stressed out at work or university is a good thing or that working under pressure may have a positive impact on your performance and productivity.

I’m glad we’ve established that. Let’s get to scientifically-backed tips we’ve promised you.

A Hot Mess Equals More Stress

How many times did you panic because of deadlines that were crashing down on you or because of a presentation that you had to prepare till midnight, or an essay that you were supposed to submit in a couple of hours?

All of those situations represent a “bad kind” of mental stress, and the first step to making you a more peaceful and relaxed human being is to avoid those situations.

Time management is something you will need to master. There are various apps that can help you to keep the track of your assignments and remind you every time that something serious is coming up.

Of course, if you’re a procrastinator, things will be more complicated for you. But we all do that. We just wait and wait because a deadline for a task that we need to do seems to be so far away.

And such tasks just keep piling up until we face a mountain of them. And you`ll have to climb it over and over again.

You need a schedule and you need to stick to it. Psychologically speaking, people find it to be oddly satisfying when you can just cross out completed tasks from a to-do list. It gives you the feeling of accomplishment and a visual representation of your success.

What is more, having a schedule or a to-do-list will help you to be more effective, productive, and, of course, will become a solid stress-relieving practice.

So stay organized and do little bits of work every day to be sure that you stick to a plan and have everything under control. Because let`s just admit that we may freak out when things go not according to our plan.

Get Out!

I mean get out of your house because this overwhelming feeling of homework load may negatively influence your mental wellbeing.

Take a walk, and breathe in some fresh air if you can find it somewhere. Take breaks every 40 minutes. At least that`s what most psychologists suggest. However, there is one interesting study, which shows that this approach may not work for certain people.

There are so-called “productivity waves” that crash down on us from time to time. And once you get into that productive mode, you`d better get everything done at once rather than chopping your workload into small pieces. So explore your options and don`t stick to popular methods only.

Don’t Forget About Your Body While Boosting Your Mind

When we’re “in the zone”, we are so eager to finish a certain assignment that we may even forget about food and decent sleep. All we think about is that paper or group project.

Always remember that your intellectual capacities and brain productivity largely depend on physiological factors.

I believe nobody will disagree that the lack of shut-eye will make you less concentrated. Lack of hydration will have a negative impact on the neurons` work, and those cells are responsible for your brain functioning.

And nutrition is obviously an absolutely crucial part. You must know that eating a piece of chocolate before doing an intellectual task may improve your performance.

It`s because of glucose which is our brain`s favorite chemical. After caffeine, of course.

About the Author
Tetiana Tsapenko is an ambitious but down-to-earth content writer with a degree in English. She finds happiness, inspiration and a sense of achievement in her job, striving to become better every day. In her free time, she watches Netflix, reads books and plays video games.