Stress levels are high this time of year. Everyone is exhausted, homework and projects pile up into an unmanageable mountain of work, and it feels like the school year will never end. And stress can make life awful, particularly if you have no idea how to handle it. Of course, there is no single “good” way to deal with stress. Different people deal with stress differently. But here are some tips for dealing with stress that, I have found, work well for most people.

1) Scream, shout, and throw things. As your pile of homework builds, so will your stress. Bottling all that up is unhealthy and exhausting. And we can’t have that! And the best way to release all of that pent up stress is in short, but violent, bursts of anger. So be mad! Shout! Scream! Throw things across the room! We recommend doing this alone, and only throwing pillows, for your safety as well as the safety of others. You wouldn’t want to deal with a lawsuit on top of all of that homework.

2) Rip apart old homework. See tip #1.

3) SLEEP!  Let’s be real here. You probably aren’t going to do any homework after 11. You’re just going to spend the night on the internet or watching TV or reading a book and won’t do your homework until you realize that it’s 3 a.m., and you do have school tomorrow, and YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED YOUR HOMEWORK YET. And then you don’t end up in bed till 4 and you have to drag yourself through the school day with 3 hours of sleep. And that makes everything worse. So just SLEEP.

4) Eat. Believe it or not, eating is incredibly important. Food gives you energy, and you will need all the energy you can get. Not eating well (skipping a lot of meals, eating small meals, or even eating too much junk food) can be incredibly dangerous, particularly if you aren’t sleeping well. Undernourishment+stress=major physical exhaustion. Combine that with mental exhaustion and life becomes really cruddy really fast. So please, for the love of all things good, eat, sleep, and take care of yourself. Despite what you may believe, your health is a bit more important than your homework.

5) Exercise. Closely related to tips 4 and 5. Besides being healthy, it also releases endorphins, which are things that make you happy. It’s painful at first, but if you just push through the pain, you will benefit in the long run. In that way, exercise is a metaphor for life. And we can always use more metaphors for life. (And exercise can also be a great stress reliever. See tips 1 and 2.)

6) Treat yourself. You drag yourself out of bed every day and somehow finish all of your work and then wake up the next day and do it all over again. You’re surviving. And that deserves an award. So go treat yourself. Get some ice cream, and enjoy it. Watch your favorite movie. Read a book. Go do something with your friends. Being surrounded by work and demands is suffocating. Give yourself a chance to breathe.  Forget about all your work for a moment, and relax. You deserve it.

7) Realize that it will end All things must end. This is a fact of life. All the stress will go away. The huge piles of homework will dwindle, projects will be finished, and school will eventually end. So relax and keep going. You’ll survive. We all do, somehow.