stress is aight

I honestly love being stressed because under stress I’m a thousand times more productive than my usual maximum procrastination self. Most of the time I get stressed when something I give importance to has become more challenging because of new restraints. Knowing this, I often use this to my advantage to get work done, most notably when studying for tests; I often leave all my studying for the night before. When I do this, the stress gives me a feeling that I HAVE to know this by tonight, so I can’t procrastinate another day like I would on any other day before tests. That being said, I don’t like spending my entire day just on school-related things, so I try and finish everything that I absolutely need to get done in about an hour or two. If I can’t get it done in that time period, either it’s too big of a task or I didn’t understand the material in the first place. Waiting until the last moment and building up stress is also nice because it gets rid of my self-doubts. I often second guess my answers or sentences I write, but when it’s due in the next hour I stop caring whether it’s trash or not and just focus on turning something in. 

The only reason my procrastination works, however, is because I plan in advance and make sure I have no other distractions such as homework, extracurriculars, etc. for that day. That leads me to one kind of stress I don’t like; when I can’t use my plan anymore and I have to invent a whole new one. Usually, this is why I prefer to do things on my own because the more people you add to the mix the more variables in the plan, which creates more stress I can’t deal with. People have their own and different ways of thinking and it stresses me out when I’m forced to try and handle things in a way that isn’t the way I would prefer. I guess the best way I could envision what I’m trying to say is that you have 3 runners who all finish the race at the same time but run differently; one sprints at the start and dies off at the end, one saves all his energy for most of the race and sprints at the end, and one runner who is slower but more consistent throughout the race. They all achieve the same result, but they each have their own way of doing it that emphasizes their strengths which balance out with their weaknesses. When you try and force people into these other ways, these strengths and weaknesses don’t cancel out and you just end up with a worse result. 

The only other time when I don’t like stress is when it’s continuous. I can usually handle stress because I get to relax by doing exercise, playing games, listening to music, or simply sleeping. When several stress factors pile up on each other, I don’t have time to alleviate it. Right now is actually a perfect time to write about this because of teachers piling on all their final tests/essays/projects in the last two weeks of the quarter like they always do and having to worry about college applications at the same time. Even the finals study grind doesn’t compare to the stress right now; not to mention wasting my time waking up early for school only to have 1 class I'm interested out of the 5 I take, but that’s a rant for another time. Overall, when you account for other effects of having so much to do, like sleeping less and dissatisfaction, it’s just a terrible feeling and a bad experience. 

My way of dealing with stress isn’t the best though. In the past, I used to just give up and let myself get run over by it only to face the consequences later. Now, I just say fuck it and do things my own way, if it’s trash so be it. I know both approaches are flawed and if I had to boil it down to one point, it would have to be the fact that I don’t like facing my problems head-on. The problem is, more often than not, my problems aren’t going to go away and they’re only going to get worse if I keep ignoring them, so I get caught in a never-ending cycle. This cycle is why now instead of completely ignoring my problems and letting that stress build-up, I resolve them, even if it has to be completely half-assed (kind of like this blog post) so that they can’t turn into worse situations that cause even more stress.