New Article

Here's the news ahead of time! This opinion article is set for publishing tonight, which means it will be on the stands tomorrow, in the NCSU Paper, the Technician. I'm very excited.



Tentative title: Lessons for Stressin!


With upcoming finals, I thought it would be a good idea to tell you all how to de-stress. Writing this article proved to be completely stressful in and of itself. I was massacred with terrible deadlines and horrible weights on my chest. I felt like a Duke student who had recently scored too low on a test and had to do some sort of ritualized shame practice in front of a board of post-doctorate assistant-teacher's assistants. Or worse -- a UNC student who stresses about all the work he has to do when he really is just doing liberal arts (aka: YouTube). When YouTube got boring, however, I hit up WebMD and got some classic tips, just for you. Here's what the doctor site said: Write. Let your feelings out. Do something you enjoy. Focus on the present. Meditate. Use guided imagery. Ways to relax your body: Exercise. Try techniques to relax. Breathing exercises. Progressive muscle relaxation.
The problem with these, however, is that they all seem like distractions-from-stress instead of stress-fighters.
So, for a new spin I went to the Philosophy Department's Dr. Puryear, who then lent me some literature. He gave me a book on the philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza got rid of stress from knocking out the passions. As Spinoza scholar Dan Garrett said, “The constraint or removal of affects- including harmful ones – depends on the occurrence of opposite and stronger affects. An affect is more powerful if we imagine its cause to be present rather than past or future; more powerful if we imagine its object as being in the near, rather than the distant, future, or past; more powerful if we imagine its object as free rather than necessary; more powerful if we imagine its cause as necessary rather than possible; and more powerful if we imagine its object as possible rather than merely contingent” (Garrett, from the Cambridge Companion to Spinoza).
Everybody is going “huh?” So let me put this a different way. Spinoza said we have to fight fire with fire, but not just any fire. He was talking about getting rid of a basic passion with a stronger passion. Spinoza would first have us realize that we are stressed. Then, he would make us think about our goals and our grades. Then he might have us think of our passion to be de-stressed. If it's not harmful and crazy stress, then it might be good. But if it is bad, we can knock it out with our bigger passion to de-stress, or our bigger passion of studying. Some of us might already do this or have done this in the past.
Besides the normal stress-awareness tips, I'm using Spinoza to say this: when you realize that you are stressing, try to knock it out with a greater passion. How do you get your greater passion? Well, Spinoza's got the basic set up written above: it's got to be opposite and stronger. The passion for studying can knock out a lot of stress.
When people study, it's impossible to worry about tests and think about what I'm studying at the same time. This is what Spinoza means by having something “present rather than past or future.” We should take “its object as being in the near” to think of how our tests are in the future, but the stress itself is now. The larger passion that we have to use to cancel this one out is concentrating on studying. By focusing on the act of studying rather than the conflict between studying and not studying I think you can eliminate stress. But by studying alone, instead of thinking about the act of studying, you might get rid of even more stress.
Ironically, when you do de-stress, you position yourself to get better grades, which is the only point of stressing in the first place.