National Blogging Month

It's November once again. You all know what that means don't you? That's right! It's national blogging month and with national blogging month comes the challenge to write a post a day for the whole month. I did this last year, and I plan to do it again this year. However, this year I'm going to have a different theme a week to help guide my posts. This week's theme is going to be stress while in University because I've been experiencing a lot of it lately.

Let me tell you a quick story about yesterday's psychology tutorial. You might remember from last semester that in my Method's course I have to run experiments and then write a psychological report on the results. This year we did something similar to the PSE (picture superiority effect) this year in that we had to test recall involving different words. We were all put into groups and then presented four different things to test. My group was the last to be called upon and everyone else had taken the other subjects so our group said we'd take the last one which was "frequency/familiarity". Sounds simple right?

Well, you're wrong. Don't feel bad, I was wrong as well. When we said that's the one we'd take he said "just choose either frequency or familiarity", so we all just said that we'd do familiar versus unfamiliar words. He also said that they were basically the same thing so it didn't really matter. Simple right? Wrong again. We do the experiment and everything is going smoothly. We take the hypothesis that people were more likely to remember more familiar words and less unfamiliar words. I was feeling pretty confident about writing the report because I understood what I needed to do and how to do it.

Yesterday was the next tutorial after we had run the experiments and after we took a small quiz we were given some time to work on our reports. I had noticed that there weren't any journal articles put up on "MyAberdeen" involving any previous studies with familiar word recall, just frequent words. I asked if it would be alright if I used those journal articles for the background research we are suppose to do for the report and he said something along the lines of, "oh well, you should have done frequency, but I guess if you changed your hypothesis you could do it." I also could do it if we did a different experiment.

Long story short; yesterday I went from confident about what I was going to do to really confused and really stressed about what I should do. Neither of the journal articles online deal at all with an hypothesis that I can think of that deal with the experiment we did.

So what did I do yesterday to calm down. Went to bed at 8pm and cried. I just needed to sleep. Normally I would have done something like take a hot bath or read or play a computer game, but I honestly couldn't deal last night. Dealing a lot better today and I'm glad that I don't have class tomorrow so I can just relax and start working.

What do you do to relieve stress?