Managing Stress and Anxiety: Mindfulness Techniques for Law Students.

 Managing Stress and Anxiety: Mindfulness Techniques for Law Students.

Joshua Ufedo Baba

Introduction:

Being a law student is to wager if you made the right decision when the stress comes crumbling you down even to your very sinews. It is often being exhausted before the day starts. To worry about your future with such crippling nervousness that you wonder if you think of anything else.

Being a law student is a losing game with time, social life, mental wellness, and to reckon with the stress you signed up for, as soon as the “rizzly” Black and white you slayed in that day comes off, you are up with tons of dreams, visions, uncertainties, deadlines, friends to check-up on, assignments, researches, extra-curricular work life, and hours you stare blankly.

This treatise will talk about mindfulness as a technique for Law students in dealing with the pressure and anxiety that come with studying law. How student life can be worthwhile if only you know what works and tune into it.

The moment you choose to study Law, your life is no longer only yours. It becomes an extension enveloping others, from family to friends, strangers to delinquents, your life becomes intertwined with people you want to be around and others. Well, you have no option but to be around. 

However, it is stressful as a student, you are implored to fill up by engaging in tasks, building up charisma, opening up to opportunities, and building a stellar CV. It is not easy to follow through, often, if you were not passionate from the inception, your fire is snuffed out under the burden. That is where Mindfulness comes in.

 The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “Mindfulness” as 

"The practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one's thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis".

Mindfulness is being present. Present to the moment, and reeling through that instance having little worry about the future. Mindfulness is in those conscious long walks, that deep sleep, those moments you create art, put ink to paper, paint to placard, nail to scaffold. 

Frivolity is necessary for mindfulness, little diversions that remove us from an automated life. Practices that remind us of our humanness— those moments we stop to heave breaths, sing a jingle, laugh till our stomach hurt, cry till our eyes have hollows— these pauses, halts, are necessary for mindfulness.

As Law students, there are moments when for a long time we are unaware. We count the time passing, the endless strikes, the bombardment of lectures, the ever-increasing Law school fees, and if the next level will be kind to us as we have faltered in our present level. 

When do we ever pause? 

The Buddhists call “Mindfulness” consciousness. Similar to yin-yang, mindfulness is to know that life is transient, and in its transcendence, its fleetingness, the only good you can do is be present. 

When you live in the ambit of the present, the wrenching hand of anxiety is far, and the wrecking hand of stress is kept at bay. To be anxious is to be nervous about the future, paralyzed even by it. To be stressed is to be strained, and have life sapped out of you. 

However, mindfulness is both a prevention and a cure for a life of pressure and apprehension.

Here are the mindfulness techniques that can be employed by Law students to relieve stress and anxiety:

1. Take deep breaths: Life is passing and often we forget ourselves in tasks and duties. Jerk yourself to reality by breathing consciously. Nothing reminds us of the present like lungful breaths and annotated gasps.

2. Work with a schedule: Making schedules is hard especially if you love a spontaneous and random life. But we get tired of surprises as much as we anticipate being surprised. A life full of surprises and one left to the benevolence of every day, is a life replete with anxieties and dashed hopes. Schedules help us plan realistically, and with every little work-done tick, we are satisfied with achieving diminutive goals.

3. Take long walks: Walks are the easiest stress releasers. It helps not only as an exercise activity but also as a means to clear one's brain. Soren Kierkegaard had this to say about walking:

 "Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day, I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus, if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right."

4. Cultivate the mind: Note that nothing hurts greatly as the mind. A vast majority will suffer in the mind rather than in the body, mindfulness is more helpful in the cultivation of a healthy mind stamped to the present, than the anxieties of the future or the guilt of the past. Cultivating a healthy mind is to be positive, not dangerous positivity that we refuse to learn, or is air-headed to doom. Rather, a positivity that tries to see both the good and bad in a situation and reckon that they are there to teach us lessons.

5. Avoid destination stints: Life is a continuous journey without a stop, as a law student, plan on undergoing a journey with no destination, and reshuffle your goals as soon as you attain them so you do not linger or dwell in the past attainments. Mindfulness while giving priority to the present be aware that even the present is unwrapped each second like a gift, and they pass away quickly. Celebrate the attainment, and draw inspiration from them, but do not relish in them forever.

6. Listen, Listen, Listen, and Listen: The first 'listen' is to hear, the second is to weigh, the third is to understand, and the fourth is to adopt. Listening is key not just to mindfulness, but to our everyday dialogues pervaded by opinionated lots. In a world with few listeners, mindfulness encourages us to listen to the ebb and flow. Everybody has something to teach us, even the fool in his folly inspires great lessons. Ernest Hemingway had this to say: 

"When people talk listen completely. Don’t be thinking what you’re going to say. Most people never listen. Nor do they observe. You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that. If that room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling."

I know it is hard as a Law student to listen wholly, but listening and being mindful is essential. Still, gauge what you hear.

7. Sleep: I think this is a point for me also. As a Law student, you are at enmity with sleep, the night before an exam is worse, and you won't even bat an eyelid. But when you are so stressed that you feel the weight of the world hanging on your shoulder, take a nap. Sleep might be an escape to some, but it also relaxes the body and refreshes the brain. Your quiet nap can be meditating anywhere— not snoring— the aim of sleep is to disconnect from the stress.

8. Ask for advice: Those who have gone before you have made a trail that you can follow. We are all ignorant of the things we do not know, and while some might take it as a bad thing, there is nothing wrong with being ignorant as far as you are willing to learn. You learn by asking for advice, just as you get through a new place by asking for directions. Ask for advice, it saves a lot of stress and anxieties you incur worrying.

9. Pray: It is not simple to come to reckoning with one's problems. Prayers are not just that. They are moments we think of all our problems and thank God for the solutions to our past problems. Prayers are the moments some take into account their life, and mindfulness encourages us that while we might forgo the past, the past is a link to the present, and the present a ticket to the future we are not to be anxious about.

Conclusion:

Life does not have a panacea, an answer to its infinite challenges. Such is the issue in law. I am still learning to tread this path lightly, row the boat softly, and journey through these treacherous waters with care. Mindfulness will help solve so many of the problems we even anticipate. Problems never end, all you can do is worry-less and find ways to solve them.