We had a workshop organized by the visiting psychotherapist. She has been living on campus for a year or so, and is expected to leave the campus soon. We also have an in house counselor who is available to students for discussions.

What are a psychotherapist and a counselor doing on campus? Why ‘Relax and Rejuvenate’ workshop?

Human mind is a complex and dynamic organism; operates quite contextually. It quite conveniently forgets that the person who owns it has been a successful one and is hence at ISB. It starts comparing him with all others around, puts pressure on him for non-performance, relative performance, and finally completely goes berserk because of sleep deprivation.

The pressure here is just too high to be normal. People have ups and downs. Some have a tendency to get stressed easily. But that does not mean that life is impossible here. Most of the students here are mature and tend to manage themselves. If and when then self-management becomes difficult, approaching a counselor should be an apt choice and there is no need to feel awkward about it. Making such resource available is one more positive for ISB.

Relax and Rejuvenate workshop was to enable us proactively manage stress and become more efficient. She spoke about a few tips to relieve ourselves of stress during high-stress situations as exams, interviews, etc. She also spoke about meditation as a long term strategy to get better control over self.

We tend to generalize (I can never do that); awfulize (things are going pretty bad and there seems to be no recourse); do shoulding (I should be doing this; I should have done that, etc); blame others (just before the exam I had this cold, etc) and personalize (the Prof dint pick me up for cold calling despite the fact that I had kept my hand up for a long time. Perhaps, he does not like me). These are some of the ways in which we tend to think. All it takes to reverse this kind of thoughts is, take a break and try to examine the validity of such claims being made by the mind. Just by changing the place where we are sitting or changing the context or reading some book or just talking to a friend or sweetheart – all these can be stress busters.

But in the long run, there is nothing to beat meditation as a means to get control over mind.

PS: Long years ago, I used to meditate.I can vouch that it gives tremendous power over mind. Today, the psychotherapist asked us to meditate for 10-15 minutes. I snoozed for 5 minutes out of the 15 minutes:-) While I was upset that I did could not manage to meditate and snoozed, I immediately had a hearty laugh and came out of it. Lack of sleep can make you sleep anywhere. Anywhere. Btw, laughter is a very good stress buster too.