We all have certain resources at our disposal, our own personal sources of strength and energy. These are skills, strategies and potentials that we can use to achieve personal goals, overcome crises and become and remain healthy.
They include inner resources such as physical and mental health, the ability to cope with stress, the ability to relax, self-esteem, resilience and humour. They are also cognitive skills such as analytical thinking, creativity and self-reflection, and motivational sources of strength such as personal goals, values and positive memories. External resources can be social networks and relationships, financial security, cultural and spiritual practices or hobbies.
Especially in stressful phases or when living with mental illness, it is often easy to lose sight of your own resources. For more stability, focus and energy, it is important to recognise your personal resources, nurture them and use them effectively in your everyday study life. Here are a few suggestions for you.
Find strategies to manage stress and cultivate self-care
Stress during your studies is unavoidable – be it due to external factors such as exam phases or internal stressors such as feelings of overwhelm and self-doubt. Students with mental illnesses or neurodivergence in particular often experience this stress even more acutely. Stress is not only negative. It warns us when we are overstretching ourselves and, to a certain extent, also makes us more productive. The most important thing is how we deal with it. How are your time, physical and mental capacities? What anti-stress strategies do you use in your everyday life? Which of them are good for you and which are not?
If you regulate your overactivated nervous system on a regular basis, this will make you more resistant to stress. Make sure you have enough balance to your hectic university life and find strategies that really support you in the long term. Ensure a pleasant alternation of activation and relaxation. Consciously take time for rest, reflection, hobbies, socialising and exercise. Relaxation techniques and mindfulness exercises offer long-term support and help you to deal with stress more calmly. These can be short breathing exercises, yoga, meditation or progressive muscle relaxation (universities or health insurance companies often offer courses and workshops on these topics).Small everyday rituals such as listening to music, going for walks, writing a diary or gratitude journal, watching your favourite series or consciously spending time offline also help.
Mental illness and neurodivergence can affect drive and motivation in a variety of ways. A helpful thought: you don’t have to wait for energy, you can also actively generate energy. You won’t get up motivated every morning, but maybe you’ll have a better start to the day if you dance to your favourite song, cycle to university or arrange the day before to meet your favourite study mates for lunch.
Self-compassion is also a valuable tool: treating ourselves with the kindness and care that we would show to a good friend. Self-compassion protects against anxiety and depression, strengthens life satisfaction and emotional stability, and has been proven to promote emotional resilience.
Observe your thought patterns: how do you talk to yourself and about yourself? Do you have unrealistic expectations of yourself or others? Excessively high standards create pressure – not everything always has to be perfect, often „good enough“ will do. Self-compassion helps you to be less hard on yourself, accept mistakes better and change stressful ways of thinking. Try not to compare yourself to students without impairments, but recognise your own abilities and celebrate your successes. This strengthens your self-efficacy and enables you to see stressors more as challenges that you can overcome.
TED Talk: Kristin Neff, The Space Between Self-Esteem and Self Compassion
HAW Hamburg: Mindfulness and relaxation in everyday university and work life
Create a social network
Maybe you’re homesick and feel alone because you’re new to the city. Do you find it difficult to get to know new people or do you find it hard to make friends in your classes or your dorm? First of all, this is not a bad thing and completely normal. Even if it is rarely talked about, everyone experiences feelings of loneliness at some point in their lives. Surveys show that more and more young people are suffering from loneliness and that this is having a negative impact on their health. Loneliness has nothing to do with the number of people around you, but with your subjective perception of the quality of these connections.
Experiencing connectedness with other people and feeling seen is a basic human need. The coronavirus pandemic has shown us all how painful it is when closeness, touch and community are suddenly missing. Loneliness causes feelings of helplessness, shame, sadness and a lack of self-worth. Especially when it becomes chronic, it can make you ill – even physically. It can increase the risk of mental illness, and mental illness can often trigger phases of social withdrawal and isolation. People with impairments are proven to be more frequently affected by experiences of loneliness.
This makes it all the more important to build up a social safety net that gives you support during this challenging time at university. Fulfilling relationships with other people can make it easier to cope with stress (e.g. exams) and protect you from the effects of stress and overload. They can provide you with practical help and emotional support, listen to you, encourage you, make you laugh and put you in a better frame of mind.
You don’t have to be good friends with all your contacts and talk about everything. It has been proven that even small, everyday encounters, such as a chat with a neighbour in the stairwell or with a fellow student in the canteen queue, can help you to feel more connected. Make a point of regularly spending time with people who are good for you. If you find it difficult to stay in touch, you can let them know and ask them to encourage you to come out of your shell more often for a walk or a phone call.
At the university, you can get in touch with others through language courses, workshops organised by the student counselling service or the study entry programmes. Find study groups or partners among your fellow students for mutual help and motivation, commitment and exchange. You can also contact the counselling centres at your university or make use of the services offered by Student Health Management. Outside the university, sports programmes, hobby courses and clubs, Discord groups, self-help groups or voluntary work can help you feel more connected.
Whether and how you communicate your mental illness or neurodivergence in these encounters is entirely up to you. It is absolutely fine if you prefer to keep your impairment to yourself. If you do tell people about it, this can often create new opportunities and more connection. We have put together some suggestions for you on the subject of „Should I tell?“
Student Counselling Office newsletter, HAW Hamburg: „Lonely or alone? Ways out of isolation“ (german and english)
Pack an emergency kit
Are you often overwhelmed by strong feelings or high levels of tension? In a quiet moment, write a list of things you can do to regulate yourself again quickly. What calms you, what stimulates you, what takes your mind off things? The purpose of these „skills“ is to gain distance from emotions or tension through external stimuli and thereby defuse upsetting situations. When a challenging moment like this comes up again, you can choose one or more items from the list and use them to help you recover from being overwhelmed and regain your self-efficacy. In exam situations, you can make particularly good use of skills that relax or stimulate your senses.
These can be things like…
- Be active (tidy up, go to the cinema, do crafts, make music, go for a walk, arrange to meet friends…)
- Redirect your thoughts (play “I spy”, do a puzzle, write a diary, write a shopping list, draw with your left hand…)
- Relax (meditate, progressive muscle relaxation according to Jacobsen, go to the sauna, EFT tapping, do a mindfulness exercise, drink tea and read your favourite book…)
- Stimulate your senses (snap a rubber band on your wrist, put an effervescent tablet in your mouth, bite on a chilli, smell peppermint oil, hot-cold showers, listen to loud music and dance like noone’s watching…)
You can also pack a small emergency kit that you fill with your favourite skills and always carry with you.
Check out skill training lists from DBT (Dialectical Behavioural Therapy) for inspiration.
Stress Killers: Comprehensive Skills list
And if none of this works…
Sometimes even the best planning and the best stress management won’t help, e.g. if your illness flares up and suddenly everything is different. Listen to yourself and seek support – your health should always come first!
There is the possibility to take a period of leave for one semester so that you can take proper care of your health (please note that you are not entitled to BAfÖG during periods of leave due to illness). You can take some time to recover, arrange for a hospital or therapy placement, or access supportive services such as occupational therapy or outpatient social psychiatry (ASP). The counselling centres at your university can help you with this.