Shine-Opinión: El estrés.

Stress can be defined as the body's physical, mental, and emotional response to challenging situations. Stress can be positive or negative. Positive stress is called "Eustress" while the negative stress is called "Distress". Stress is something we go through every day of our adult life and even childhood too. One one crosses into adulthood and most times leaves their parents house to that place call the University or College another level of stress entirely unfolds for them. Having to attend lectures at different locations (speaking of a typical Nigerian University), having to submit stuffs, sign stuffs and lots more, not having enough time for oneself, this leads to stress mostly the negative stress.

YES! Stress is a normal thing to feel in my country, Nigeria. Being in a country full of corrupt practices, insecurity, lack of food and other social amenities it is enough to feel stressed and even get depressed. Everyday as a Nigerian we have to wake up early to go to work and on getting out we meet a heavy traffic which keeps us in one position for hours and we end up getting to work late to receive a query, this is enough reason to feel stress.
Now to my personal life. As a Nigerian student we feel stressed everyday of our life mostly the negative kind of stress we do not feel the positive stress sef. Having to wake up to rush to school for an early morning lecture, skipping meals, having to search for lecture venues because venue was shifted for some reasons and then getting to the venue and not finding your lecturer in class and you have to wait for him to get to class and sometimes he doesn't even show up for that lecture, it is enough reason to feel stressed.
Or having to stay up all night studying for a test and getting to school on the day of the test to hear that it was cancelled for some reasons is another reason to feel stressed. Or coming back from school and not finding anything to eat and you do not have any money on you and you just have to starve until your parents send you your allowance just because you are not working is enough to make me feel stressed.

YES! Stress has affected me both physically and mentally. I've been sick for days just because of how stressed I felt within the week and this ended up making me lose alot of weight. Also mentally, I have felt stressed to the extent that I talk like I am going crazy and also I tend to just pace around in the room talking to myself just to try and feel better.

At times when I feel stressed I do a couple of things that I love to do naturally.

1. I listen to music and sing along. This makes me feel less stressed and better.
2. I take a walk.
3. I draw, paint or create arts. Most times when I do any of these I end up doing sad girl arts and stuffs related to sadness but whenever I do it I feel stress free.
4. I write. Writing is one of the ways I express myself, so I often do this to feel better when I'm down, tired and stressed.

Stress is something we cannot really avoid in our daily lives but we have to figure out remedies and stuffs that helps us feel less stress and focus on doing them to destress.

Thank you for reading my post. I invite @zekanem, @vudeme123 and @ekemini01 to participate in this contest.

All pictures are mine and were gotten from my WhatsApp