2nd Place Winner

Author: Caroline

Things I Do to Deal with Stress

I never realized how much stress my day-to-day life brings. A normal day for me consists of waking up at 5:00 AM to go to swim practice, getting ready for school in the locker room, going to pick up breakfast, and heading to school where I work for seven hours just to head back to the pool for another swim practice before I finally get to go home and eat dinner, shower, and then start on my piles of homework. Honestly just reading this sentence back makes me feel like I’m going to burst an aneurysm. It sounds like a lot, and it is, but you don’t realize that when you are in the middle of all of it. That is, until a global pandemic cancels all of your day-to-day activities and you are suddenly left at home with oodles of free time, a rarity in your “normal” life, and time to reflect on your life and realize how jam packed your days are.

During that time, if you were to ask me how I dealt with the stress I suddenly no longer really had, I probably would have said painting or baking. And, while those are certainly pastimes I still enjoy in the summers, I wouldn’t say they are my main stress outlets throughout the grueling years of high school. Asking myself this question now, I would confidently say that I deal with stress through exercise.

I have been a competitive swimmer since I was four years old, and I got tired of losing the summer league meets to kids that swam year round. I decided to become one of them, and I have found solace in the constant black line at the bottom of the pool and the feeling of the water moving over my skin ever since. In thirteen years, I have found that, no matter how hard of a day I am having, or how tired I am, going to the pool and pushing my body to its limits can always wash away most of my problems or stress. I suppose it has something to do with the rush of endorphins you get when you work out or the ability to just pound out your anger on the water. But when I am in that pool, it is just me in my head and the water around me. I think that the ability to have that time in my own head to reflect on and process everything that I have experienced in a day is where the real stress release comes in. You can be angry and go do a brutal workout in a gym, but there are people around you who, inevitably, distract you, no matter how focused you are. You simply don't have the ability to completely check out in a gym like you do in the water.

In the pool, you are isolated the moment your ears dip underwater. It is incredibly peaceful, even during the hardest sets, to have one-on-one time with yourself. You get to physically have stress release through the biological effects of exercise, and then you get to mentally have a mini one-on-one self therapy session where you can just say whatever you are feeling. No one can judge you because it is all inside your own head. I tend to use this time to organize all of the things I need to do for the rest of the day or scream about something that really ticked me off. The screaming part might not be so private because everyone else can hear the muffled echo of it, but nobody really cares enough to take any real note. It is very healthy, I think, to talk to oneself. Not in like a “I am delusional and I have voices in my head” kind of way, but in more of a “I am the only person in the world that is truly dedicated to my own well-being and I should really sort out what I want and what I have to do to get there while I have time to just think” kind of way. Having an internal back-and-forth like this really helps me to feel more put together because it forces me to address everything that is going on in my life.

No matter how ugly a topic is, you can’t ignore it when it is an elephant in your own mind and you have no other distractions. So, while creative arts and culinary expeditions are certainly therapeutic, in my opinion, the biggest stress reliever in my life is the sport that seems to induce a majority of my stress. Isn’t that ironic?