What does it take to have a peaceful mind and what is stress in relation to students of architecture?
I recently had a workshop about stress and mindfulness at uni and I was wondering to myself, what is stress? What is it in terms of architecture and how can we minimise this?
Let me explain a little about stress first.
Stress comes in many different forms. We have different perspectives about what stress is and how one deals with it may be completely different to the next.
For us students it is probably that final presentation we have at the end of each semester. The build up and compilation of the works created within the whole semester and creating a giant, completely new project within a few weeks and making beautiful drawings and renders within this short period of time can be very stressful for many, including myself.
We have different levels of stress ranging from low, optimal to high. This is shaped in almost a bell curve and the optimal stress levels is in between high and low levels of stress.
Now this may seem obvious, as low levels of stress gets people in the mindset of "oh I have plenty of time! I don't need to do it all now." and procrastinate, procrastinate and never end up doing work. In contrary, those who have high levels of stress will be way too freaked out and think "I DON'T HAVE ENOUGH TIME TO FINISH EVERYTHING" and end up wasting time stressing and worrying, and end up having irrational thoughts and not doing work properly. This high level of stress for an extended period of time could also potentially be dangerous. Now how can stress be dangerous you ask? Because the chemicals produced within our bodies when stressed (or very stressed) become constant and the longer you are completely stress the longer your body needs to produce these chemicals. And then when you stop stressing, your body stops and runs out of energy to go back to normal.
You can think of this in a simple concept. Imagine you are on a set of stairs and you can't go backwards. Every time you get more stressed or the longer you are stressed, you walk up a step. When you stop stressing you have to jump off. The higher you walk the higher you have to fall. What happens when have to jump from a platform that is too high up? I'll let you answer that one.
Therefore, the optimal stress level would be ideally in between. You don't think that you have too much time and you aren't so stressed that you become irrational. We become much more productive with just small amounts of stress pumped into us.
It's best not to freak out, go outside take a walk or meditate to keep yourself in check. Watch a movie and take some time out to chill, we don't need to spend 24 hours on architecture, that will probably be less productive that you think.
