Hi there, welcome to day 9 of your journey to relaxation. One of my favorite things about where I live is that there are so many things to do outdoors. I live in Seattle. For those of you that don’t know about the geography of Washington State, I’m going to give you a crash course in it.

If you drive an hour and a half in any direction, you can change complete ecosystems. Seattle is in a temperate zone. To the east, we have a desert. To the southwest, we have a rainforest. We have alpine mountains in the Cascades and the Pacific Ocean only about 2 hours away. We’ve got the San Juan Islands with wildlife you don’t find here on the mainland. It’s truly a wondrous place to live. And no, it doesn’t rain ALL the time. That’s just a vicious rumor we spread to keep this place to ourselves. ☺

Why am I talking geography? You may be thinking that this sounds like school are wondering when the relaxation starts. For me, it already has. I love nature. I always have. When I’m stressed, I can go for a walk and take deep breaths or air that isn’t as polluted as you may find in other places. A plus about the rain: it cleans the air so you don’t have that haze that you may find in others cities, provided you can see it between the skyscrapers. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello and welcome to your daily dose of stress management tips from the HPA staff! I’m Allison the Slytherin Prefect, and even though you may be a Gryffindor you will want to listen in. Okay, confession time:  for three year every day of  finals I get so stressed out that I throw up before I go to school.  However that all changed we I started to work on relaxing instead of cramming 24/7.

Whenever the dreaded finals come around I feel like a dementor is following me around.  But my magic answer to these dementors is not chocolate… but art.  Now,  I know it may sound a little weird but trust me there are many reasons why just coloring a picture can help you relax.

First off, it gives you a sense of accomplishment, just Hermione would feel after mastering a spell. This sense of accomplishment always made me feel more willing to trudge on with my studying. Secondly, it makes you go into an almost meditative state, which means if you find it awkward to meditate you can just doodle, color, draw, write, or paint to get the same basic affects.  Also it helps you have balance in this stressful time of the year. This means taking a break between the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain. Just think how balanced Hermione would be if she would just take some time to do some coloring.

Now there are a few that helps me more than others. The one that helps me the most is coloring., because of it’s simplicity and how it is so hard to judge your artistic talent when all you need to do is fill in between lines. Now, if you’re like me and cannot draw to save your life, trying drawing simple shapes. If some looks like you’re crazy for drawing them, tell them this “it’s abstract art” and you will so much more like you know what you are doing.

So go out there and make some art, maybe it will become a new hobby.

I feel the need to start this off by admitting that somehow writing this blog never made it on to my “list.”

Hi! My name is Taekia, I am the New Staff Manager at the HPA and today I’m going to be talking about organizing to relieve stress.

There are so many things in life that I need to do and keep track of that I sometimes feel like Hermione must have before heading out to search for the Horcruxes. (I pick Hermione, b/c I imagine Harry was more stoic about the whole thing).  I have classes, an internship, running the STAND chapter at my school, my HPA work, and nowadays family stuff and Christmas shopping and it can get overwhelming especially when my room is messy, or I don’t have a clear picture of what needs to be done, or I’m thinking about each individual thing too much.  Like Hermione, I have to carefully plan and organize everything I might need on my journey.

I find that cleaning the spaces around me (specifically my room or the bathroom) helps me relieve stress because when I’m cleaning and figuring out where things go it’s the only thing I can focus on. I’m not thinking of the 100 other things I have to do so much as where the matching shoe to the one in my hand is.  There’s also something to be said about cleaning the tangible clutter in your room helping to clean the clutter in your mind.  In a life full of long-term stressors cleaning is something I can do… and finish… and feel accomplished about.  Not to mention, if the lemon-fresh scent of clean linoleum doesn’t help clear your mind, I’m not sure what will!

If you couldn’t tell from the above, I think that the sense of accomplishment that comes with completing tasks is a natural high that makes you feel better, makes everything more manageable and less stressful.   This is why I love making lists of what I need to do. It’s another way of creating a tangible link to stressors.  AND… It allows you to cross them off!  Occasionally, I’ll create lists that have a two things on them that I’ve already completed or are well on my way to completing so I know there’s something to cross off and I can see that no matter how hectic things may feel, I am getting things done.

I hope this helps guys, if you have any other suggestions or questions leave them in the comments or take the conversation over to the Common Room!

It is time for day #2 of the Breaking out of the Muggle Mindset series on stress. My name is Elizabeth and I keep up with different website statistics for the HPA and am also the Gryffindor house prefect! I hope that my way of dealing with stress will help you in some way throughout the next few weeks!

Stress is something that everyone deals with. I sometimes think that stress is something that I will never be able to escape from. I go from class to class everyday as well as participating in many different groups and organizations around campus. During my few free hours of the day, I lock myself away in the library and attempt to get all of my work and studying done. Going non-stop all day everyday gets tiring and of course stressful. My friends tell me that I go into phases of “going under my invisibility cloak” and disappearing to study or get other work done. When I decide to come out of hiding it is usually because I have become so tired and stressed out that all I have left to do is be in a bad mood and “snap”. I call this my mental breaking point.

A couple weeks ago when I began to study for my finals I realized that making it to that mental breakdown was not worth it. I know I am smart and I don’t need anyone telling me that in order to remain smart I have to study until my brain falls apart. I began to think about something that I enjoyed doing that would allow me to not think about school or anything else that I had to do. My answer came to me quickly, Exercise.

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Hi! Welcome to Day #1 of our Breaking Out of the Muggle Mindset series on stress. I’m Jess, a writer/copy editor for the HPA. I hope that by sharing one way that I cope with stress, I might inspire you to deal healthily with your own.

First, a confession: I used to eat breakfast in the bathtub. As a graduate student at the nation’s top-ranked library school, I took a course schedule that would make Hermione proud and worked three jobs. I got home from work after midnight, woke in time for an 8am class, and rolled breakfast and bathing into one precariously balanced act because without a Time Turner, I couldn’t do them separately. I reasoned that getting a “real” job would be worth the intense schedule.

Today, I’ve been out of grad school for seven months, working in teen services at a public library. It’s a more balanced life, but it’s still easy to fall into the Muggle Mindset of “if you’re not stressed, you’re not doing enough!” At work, I help out in other departments; at home, I push myself to keep up with chores; in the HPA, I clear my calendar when last minute editing needs to be done. There’s nothing wrong with any of these things, but if I don’t actively manage the stress they cause, I’m crankier than Molly Weasley before Bill and Fleur’s wedding.

Mrs. Weasley’s short temper during that time made life difficult for Harry, Ron, and Hermione. One person’s stress affected others, something that often happens in our world. I’m certainly guilty of it. When I came home from the library recently, my cats thronged around my ankles in greeting. I should have felt lucky to have a good rapport with them. Instead, I was irritated. I’d had a frustrating day, and they were making it impossible for me to so much as step into my house.

I’ll admit it: I yelled at them. Yep. The cats that had gone out of their way to greet me scattered in surprise and alarm. If you ever want to feel like a total jerk, look at your pet’s faces after you’ve been, well, a total jerk. They’ll tell you exactly what you’re like without saying a word.

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It’s December, and for many of us that means exams, college applications, and the holidays. No matter where you are or what you’re doing, it can be a stressful time of year. And whether we’re normally Harrys or Rons or Lunas, stress can turn us into full-on Hermione mode.

We live in a culture where it’s okay to act like a pre-exam Hermione all of the time, because it has somehow become “normal” or even “cool” to be that stressed. It’s a Muggle Mindset that says in order to be productive or hardworking, we must live with a level of stress that is so high it can cause us to panic or lose sleep over what we “should” be doing. And worst of all, this Muggle Mindset tells us that if we relieve stress, or if we choose to live at a low-stress level, it means we are lazy or careless (which, of course, is simply untrue).

But we’re not Muggles, and we don’t have to act like them. We don’t have to be that stressed. We can Break Out of the Muggle Mindset, even at this stressful time of year.

For the next ten days, HPA staffers will be blogging about how we relieve stress – and challenging you to decrease your stress levels with us. Join us here every day for new tips and tricks – and be sure to add your own in the comments or over in The Common Room.

Happy December, everyone! Let’s make it stress-free and relaxing!

Today’s Task: What stresses you out? Make a list of 3-5 situations or feelings that make you stressed. Over the next ten days, we’ll work on tackling those lists and making them more manageable.

I just read an article in the NY Times that made me feel the following:

The United States of America is finally having an important debate where:

1- the strained debate on global warming, 2- the too often ignored debate on civilian protection, genocide, and poverty, AND 3- the often sensationalist debate around national security threats for the United States are suddenly interconnected:
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Hey there all you crazy social activists, dreamers and HP fans! My name is Lisa Valdez and I’d like to tell you a bit about a project I’m going to be starting with the HPA. I’m a 21 (22 on Thursday, woohoo!) year old girl from Rhode Island, long time HP fan and, more recently, social activist. I currently live in Boston and I’m a worker-owner of a Fair Trade coffee, tea, and cocoa cooperative just south of the city called Equal Exchange. In my work I get to see first hand how the products we purchase in the US affect the lives of producers all over the world. You may have heard people saying that “the world has gotten smaller” and I’m here to tell you that it is absolutely true. Walk down the aisle of a grocery store and pick up any product you like. The ingredients listed will come from all over the world, from palm oil in Africa to sugar from the Dominican Republic. I get to see how our conventional system of trade marginalizes producers and benefits a very wealthy few in the global West, but also how Fair Trade can hugely benefit producers all over the world. I’ve learned that everything in this world is connected, and I’m here to talk trade and Harry Potter, two of my favorite topics that might not seem too closely related at first glance.

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Living with depression is not easy. Whether you or someone you love suffers from it, depression can be a difficult thing to live with. But it’s not the end of the world either. Believe me, I should know.

It’s a bit of a long and personal blog, but my main intention is to help others understand that there are many people that suffer from depression, and they are not alone. And even though it can be a hard thing to deal with, it’s not impossible. It isn’t  something to be embarrassed about either.

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