Valentine's Day: It's All In The Way You Celebrate

Today is a Monday. Usually on Mondays I roll out of bed, throw on a pair of sweatpants, and head to school still half asleep. However, this morning was different. When I woke up I was in a fairly good mood (which is much better than I can say for most Mondays), I dressed in red and pink, and I walked into school to see many other people dressed in the same colors. If you haven’t figured it out already, today is Valentine’s Day!

Valentine’s Day means something different to everybody. Most commonly, it is a holiday during which two people in a romantic relationship express their love and appreciation for one another through cards, candies, and gifts. In my family, Valentine’s Day is a holiday for expressing familial love as well. My mother always gets my sister and I Valentine’s Day gifts to show us how much she cares about us. There are also some people who find this holiday to be pointless because they feel that love shouldn’t be more important on any one day than on others.

Although initially the way that you perceive Valentine’s Day may seem unimportant, it actually reveals information about your identity. They types of relationships you choose to celebrate on holidays such as this one show which relationships are the most important to you. For some people, the most important person in their life might be a boyfriend, girlfriend, or spouse, so they choose to celebrate their relationship with this person. Some people are more family oriented, so they choose to have a nice dinner with their whole family or call their parents to tell them how much they mean to them. There are also some people who are less comfortable expressing their emotions than others, so even if they have relationships to celebrate, they don’t do so with big, loving gestures. Valentine’s Day can also be a holiday for celebrating friendships, so some people choose to just go out to dinner with some of their closest friends. However we choose to spend our holiday, we are revealing which relationships are the most important to us and how comfortable we are with expressing this importance.

Stress Who?

We all get stressed every now and then; especially around this time of year as we’re scrambling to get things ready for the holidays so that winter break can hopefully be relaxing. Stress can be an obstacle that prevents you from doing what you want, and sometimes even being who you want to be. There are many things that can cause stress: school, work, family, friends, social obligations, and countless others. There isn’t any real way to completely avoid stress because it is a part of life that everybody will experience. However, there is good news. Once you have accepted that stress will be part of your life sometimes, you can experiment with a number of different ways to relieve or reduce the amount of stress you have to deal with.

How to Deal
There is no right way to deal with stress because we are all different. Some people find that music (listening to, playing, or singing) is a good way to relieve stress. Others find that just driving around can be a very calming experience. One of my personal favorite ways to alleviate stress is to lose myself in a good movie or tv show and just escape reality for a little bit, because often once I return to it I find that things aren’t as bad as I thought they were. What’s your favorite way of dealing with stress? I’m interested in finding new methods.

How NOT to Deal
Even though there is no right way to deal with stress, there are some wrong ways. Anything that involves hurting yourself or others is an unproductive and dangerous way of handling a stressful situation. If there is any question in your mind whether or not the way you are handling your stress is dangerous, chances are you should find a new method.

When Stress Becomes You
You may be wondering what stress has to do with your identity. Being stressed is an emotion, not something that defines you, right? To a certain extent, yes. However, like any emotion, if you don’t know how to control it, stress can consume you and define how you live your life. Being stressed can lead to problems with your mental and physical health, and can also affect the way that you treat the people around you. As I’m sure you’re aware, people who are under a lot of stress aren’t always the most pleasant to be around. None of us want to be known as that grumpy person, so as an early new year’s resolution let’s promise to find healthy ways to reduce the amount of stress in our lives.