The Best Time to Relax Accelerated Learning Resources

The Best Time to Relax

My final semester of college is already off to a bounding start, and instead of dreading the new semester of seemingly endless work ahead of me, I am already finding myself growing sad about saying goodbye to Charlottesville and UVA.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not particularly enjoy case studies, clinical simulations and medication calculation tests, but I do know that I will miss the luxury of being a student, having holidays off, and using my college ID to get discounts everywhere.

Today was my “last first” day of clinical in the hospital, and appropriately enough for an anxious job-seeking nursing student like myself, my clinical is in a psychiatric unit at a local community hospital. As I walked into the unit bleary-eyed at 7 a.m., I never expected to learn valuable life lessons from my own patients, and especially not on the first day. But of course, I did.

My day involved regular patient care, medication administration, and assessments. Also, characteristic of many psychiatric units, I observed group therapy sessions with occupational therapists. After helping my patient with her morning craft of a heart-shaped, beaded Valentines Day ornament, it was time to start group therapy.

The session was titled Life Skills and was themed around stress. I expected to be a passive and observant member of the group therapy class, providing a therapeutic presence for my patient. However, I was surprised when I was asked to participate in the exercise. After categorizing things that were “very stressful” and “never stressful” to me, we began discussing each other’s responses. Of course I listed “finding a job” to be a source of stress for me (and “playing with my pets” to be never stressful), but I wasn’t the only one who was worried about the future. Another nursing student said the same thing, followed by a young woman who said she was also afraid of the unknown. After listening to eloquent interpretations of stress slip off the tongue of the group leader, the woman to my left volunteered to speak and said something truly insightful.

She was an older woman and was being discharged home later in the day. She said she had always put off making decisions about her future because it seemed like the easiest thing to do. She, too, found the future to be a source of stress, but said that she learned we are always in control even when we think we aren’t. Our reactions to stress are our own doing, and we need to be aware of them. We can choose what we stress about, and because the future is something we can never control or predict, we shouldn’t view it as a source of stress. She shared a quote that was written on one of the index cards we had passed around the room:

“The best time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.”

Needless to say, my “last first” day of clinical was a memorable one and I learned the best advice comes from the unlikeliest of places.

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