Forget balance, I am STRESSED!!! MAKE EVERYONE STOP CRYING!

So, you know my beautiful and profound “Balance of Occupation” post below? Since the time I wrote that post, I have A) cried on the phone to a friend about the stress, and B) been feeling like I'm having one long anxiety attack. I haven't been able to eat more than a few bites at lunch because the anxiety suppresses my appetite. Several girls in my class have discussed crying at night because they just don't feel they can handle the stress of occupational therapy school anymore. That is NOT said to scare away any prospective students – this is an anomaly for everyone to be so stressed. so don't freak out. Any graduate school program is going to have its ups and downs.

Yesterday, THREE GIRLS!!!!! IN ONE CLASS DAY!! CRIED!! AT DIFFERENT TIMES!! OVER DIFFERENT PROJECTS!!! And in all cases I was right there for the melt-down! (But I swear I was not the cause). It was a bad day, full of snarls and claws. Everybody was snippy and snappy and while I started the day in an okay mood, I was STRESSED by that afternoon. I called my friend and cried about it. It ended up being a better night though, it was Allison's pre-birthday and so Brooke and I took her out to a local Mexican restaurant called Los Compadres. We shared a margarita (Allison's first taste) and had a great time. So it got better.

Today, I realistically know that I've finally gotten close to caught up in my projects, and I shouldn't be so stressed out. But my body has a hard time listening to my brain. My heart rate is staying rapid, I feel fatigued and worried, and my tummy feels knotted. I went and worked out, hoping for an endorphin hit, but it never came. So I went to the grocery store to stock up, and now I'm home and writing in this a few minutes to chill out.

Tonight I work at 9pm, so I have 4 and a half more hours to get stuff done. I'm going to try and work hard on my book-based occupational evaluation, work on a community initiative paper, practice my assessments for tomorrow, and well, yeah, those are my three occupational therapy goals for the night. My non-OT goals for the night are to try and calm down and think about how I need to remember the lessons I learned and discussed in my Balance post below!

By the way, I'm going to give a shout-out to Google Docs. If you have gmail, you can have access to Google Docs, which allows you to share a document with other invited people. It's somewhat like a wiki, only private. I highly recommend it for OT students doing a lot of group projects – it's hard constantly downloading/uploading new versions and keeping track of things. The only word of caution is that it is beta (although stable), and so I highly recommend you do save the occasional draft to your hard drive, just in case.

Have a great day everyone. I'm pretty sure I'll post tomorrow on our final Group Dynamics session, my research group's first day of practicing assessments, and our media lab, which will focus on making something out of nothing.

Sep 25, 2007 | Category: Occupational Therapy | Comments: 2