Another quick number, student-hood is not entirely about lazy days and drunken nights (FACT!). I'm actually killing two birds with one stone here, basically every glorious Monday, we have an Interpersonal Skills session from 2-5pm, during which we discuss even more fluff and basically probe and pry way too much into each other's lives (then write up a journal about). Frankly, I thoroughly enjoy these sessions as I've always thought myself to be some sort of an amateur psychologist and my tutor is just so cute and lovely, its difficult to get mad at what most of my classmates find to be an utter waste of time. More importantly, I am on a scholarship (yes ScribbleD is a rare find...beauty+brains hahaha), so yea I have the the great joy of serving as a model student and can't really afford to skip classes except for the odd sick day :-)
Right, let's get to the meat of my post. Yesterday, we tackled Stress Management which was in itself a somewhat stressful session (the irony!). To start off, about a third of us turned up to class which made the session a bit too intimate and to some extent boring as we were stuck with the same groups for the entire duration of the class *yawn* Firstly, our tutor Tim (I'm using a fake name by the way lol) gave us a brief history on stress and its derivation from the engineering field, and then he went on to describe how stress typically manifests itself in 3 different forms, physical, emotional and behavioural. He then handed out a sheet with an extensive list of these stress manifestations, asked us to tick those we could relate with, then invited us to form groups of four to discuss our observations. In my group, one of the guys actually ticked "loss of interest in sex" and felt the overwhelming urge to go into great detail about how this particular trait applies to him. It was of course hilarious and a tad bit uncomfortable to take in (at some point I said "ooookay too much information!" but he kept going). Turns out sex for married people almost always becomes an after thought in the face of real life pressures like bills, insurance, fees and what have you. Furthermore, he told us that as a married man who has had sex waaaay too many times and in all the different positions he knows of (I think this was my TMI moment lol), he felt somewhat bored and less excited about sex as it was in his mind a matter of "been there done that" (eureeka moment! lol). Anyway we somehow managed to get off that topic but the shock factor of such intimate revelation left me rather scarred and anxious for what our next session might cause some people to reveal!
Bottom line, I was able to take away that some amount of stress is necessary for us to stay motivated about life and indeed too much of it could lead to death. Seeing as I do not believe in the usage of new age religions such as Yoga e.t.c. to destress, I believe simple mantras such as EAT.PRAY.LOVE go a longer way in ensuring long life and prosperity...hip! hip! hip! HOORAY! :-)
