Bring those stress levels down a bit

We’ve passed the year mark into this pandemic, and although vaccines are rolling out, it might not feel fast enough. There are board exams, non-board exams, love lives, family lives, making sure you’re eating enough – a lot of different things that can stress a person out. What is one to do?

Well good news: we have a few ideas for you!

First of all, there’s the Tufts Health & Wellness group. They’ve put together this page on stress and anxiety. It has resources, included guided meditations and tips on managing stress on the go. Definitely worth your time to check out!

Secondly: take a drink of water right now. Hydration is important, and not to be undervalued!

Perhaps you’re someone like me, who occasionally just wants nice calm scenes to look at in the background, while they work on other things. Well regardless of the weather or your ability to make it somewhere you find relaxing, good news: we have technology to help! Explore.org has a whole YouTube channel of various nature cams. The feeds seem to primarily be at rescues, so if you’re into wolves, you’ll see wolves. Eagles? They got that. Or maybe you just want to watch a bunch of kittens play together? I have that feed up as I write this!

There is a very wide variety of cameras available, of course, because people are people. Thrillist has a great write-up of a ton of live stream cams for you.

Finally, you could always put your printing allotment at the library to use, and get yourself some coloring pages to print out and color in. For example, Crayola has a whole section of free pages. Or if you wanted to support small business, you could always run a search on Etsy or similar sites. (Fair warning though: there’s no guarantee about whether your results will be safe for work.)

We here at Hirsh Library hope you’re able to relieve any stress as well as you can, and hope your Aprils are as low stress as highly-motivated graduate students in demanding programs can possibly be!