Reorganize thoughts for less stress

Jake Goldbas

Staff Columnist

Published: Sunday, April 5, 2009

Updated: Sunday, April 5, 2009

Jake Goldbas

Final exams are coming up, and I found myself in a bind and stressed out about school work and other engagements.

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 -Chapel Hill student who stresses about all the work he has to do when he really is just doing liberal arts (also known as 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 are all distractions from stress instead of stress-fighters.

In a book by Dan Garrett about Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher, I read about how he got rid of stress from knocking out the passions.

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 object as possible rather than merely contingent.”

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 overcome it with a greater passion. How do you get your greater passion? Spinoza’s got the basic set up written above: it’s got to be opposite and stronger. The passion of studying can knock out a lot of stress about studying (stress here being lesser passions; like thinking about studying, worrying about tests, and procrastinating.)

When people study, it’s impossible to worry about tests and think about what they’re 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, nearer passion that we can 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 would be the only point of stressing in the first place.

Send Jake your thoughts about stress to letters@technicianonline.com