It is not easy to be a student, and it is even more difficult to be a Master's student

Being a student, surely you are more or less familiar with stress. It can be stress due to finances, academic workload, personal life, balancing between study and work, or maybe because of everything at once. Here are a couple of tips that can help you.

1) Organization. If you have 5 classes a week, for each of which you need to do homework, as well as upcoming tests and projects, you may feel depressed, and the volume of tasks is overwhelming. Because of this, instead of starting to do something, you, on the contrary, will postpone everything and get distracted, finding a reason to do something else until there are even more deadlines. However, even using a simple method of organizing your time, making, for example, a schedule or noting all the tasks and dates in the calendar on your phone, you will get rid of the feeling of chaos and uncertainty where to start in the first place.

2) The organization extends to other aspects of your life, including time management. It's better instead of starting the day as it turns out and doing what you have time for or doing only what you're in the mood for today, try time-blocking. Try to set aside a few hours for more intensive work and study during those hours when you are most focused and productive. And at a time when you know that you are the least productive or it's hard for you to concentrate, do sports, housework, grocery shopping, etc. It will also help you to warn yourself against procrastination - the most common and problematic stressor among students. It also helps to control the problem of balancing social and educational stressors a little. If you know when to study and at what time to meet with friends, you will not need to think about making a decision every time. Try to experiment for several days with your schedule to find the most suitable mode for you.

3) As you probably already know, exercise is one of the best ways to let off steam and stress instead of restraining yourself and suppressing the accumulated negative emotions.

4) Loneliness is also one of the most problematic factors that can aggravate stress. By maintaining social ties and communicating with friends or acquaintances, you can get support and improve your condition, of course, knowing the limits and not neglecting academic and personal responsibilities.

5) When you feel at the limit, slow deep breathing, as well as mind observation, are good ways. The first helps activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for the function of rest, and deactivates the sympathetic nervous system, which is responsible for “Fight-or-flight”, activated in stressful situations. The second suggests that instead of avoiding the problem by being distracted by something else, the best way is to look at it carefully to understand how it happened, what you felt and what makes it worse and what can fix it. You can also try the method of talking to yourself in your head, proving to yourself that you can cope and will definitely find a way out.

6) Finally, a good way would be to break down a serious and difficult situation to resolve into small more or less manageable steps. As if when doing sports, instead of setting yourself a goal to run 10 kilometers, focus on running at least one more kilometer. So, when taking up a project, do not compare your final goal with your current situation, but rather ask yourself the question: what step should I take today to get closer to achieving the goal, and what tomorrow, and so on. It is known that we are used to overestimate what we can do in 1 day and underestimate what we can achieve in a year.