Finals week can be very stressful sometimes, especially when you’re in your junior year. The stress can cause you to sleep late or get preoccupied on your phone instead of being productive. It’s really important to de-stress, so you can focus on studying for the final exams.

The first common way of de-stressing is to finish work with some speed. While your work might suffer a little bit, teachers tend to grade a lot more leniently towards the end of the year. They understand the amount of stress we are in and are more forgiving when grading. If you finish all your work scheduled for that day early, most likely, you’ll have about two full hours of guilt-free relaxing time. When your conscious is not telling you, “you have work to do and your not doing it” relaxation is a lot more rejuvenating.

Finals week is jam packed with work, but just 30 minutes of exercise is extremely beneficial to de-stress the body. In a evolutionary lens, we did not evolve to be sitting in chairs and studying. When we do this and don’t go outside and exercise our mood goes down. Harvard Medical School suggests, “Regular aerobic exercise will bring remarkable changes to your body, your metabolism, your heart, and your spirits. It has a unique capacity to exhilarate and relax, to provide stimulation and calm, to counter depression and dissipate stress.” Students even corroborate this, “To de-stress I go outside and play basketball or just go for a walk this really help me de-stress for the finals,” junior Shaheer Sajid said.

Thirdly, another great way to de-stress is to just do whatever you genuinely enjoy doing. “I like to go on Reddit and just chill out I really get a kick out of it,” junior Nischal Dinesh said. Doing what you genuinely enjoy creates an amazing time.