Throughout the semester, my to-do list seems frequently unending and long. As a student who can never say no, I feel as though many college students face a similar situation. After one thing leads to the next, I have a bad headache and just want to lay down, completing avoiding the tasks at hand.

So, after scrolling through the Science section of Google news, I noticed an article that I feel will save some time for me and hopefully others as well. I would like to share interesting work and draw our attention to a psychology study conducted at Michigan State University which found new information about how worriers can deal with stressful tasks more efficiently and effectively.

The researchers found that simply writing about your feelings may help chronic worriers perform an upcoming stressful task more efficiently. They came to this conclusion after a months long study that measured participants brain activity and this neural evidence proved the benefits of expressive writing.

“For the study, college students identified as chronically anxious through a validated screening measure completed a computer-based “flanker task” that measured their response accuracy and reaction times. Before the task, about half of the participants wrote about their deepest thoughts and feelings about the upcoming task for eight minutes; the other half, in the control condition, wrote about what they did the day before.”

The lead author offered a great analogy following this study with two groups of college students who were identified as chronically anxious.  “Here, worried college students who wrote about their worries were able to offload these worries and run more like a brand new Prius,” he said, “whereas the worried students who didn’t offload their worries ran more like a ’74 Impala — guzzling more brain gas to achieve the same outcomes on the task.” ”

So, it seems clear that expressive writing makes the mind work less hard on upcoming tasks, which is what worriers often get “burnt out” over (i.e. when I need my nap).

After my 2015 Summer Bridge into freshman year with the Millennium Scholars Program, I learned that multitasking is not the way to being successful but now, that is how I get through my day-to-day. But, I feel as though I could stop doing that if I focused my study times more on specific things, that I would be more effective with my time. Maybe, like summer bridge, I could take a 15 minute break to get up, get coffee, or answer an email for every hour and fifteen minutes of work. Hopefully that would all lead to worrying less.

Thus, while I don’t feel this way at 8 P.M. on Sunday’s when I have pushed off writing my weekly blog for the Presidential Leadership Academy, I am thankful for the opportunity to writing something on one of the most stressful days of the week for me. I always complete my blog feeling more calm and focused. As a STEM student, I typically don’t have classes for which I write much at all and these blogs are the perfect piece to that puzzle.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/psyp.12990/abstract;jsessionid=DD22A22325D0B75C6301B4FFB519F9B9.f04t02