First of all, let me just say, I am so jealous of everyone going on the BLEND retreat this weekend! Beth from Mangoes and Miles had the great idea of trying to put together a retreat for college bloggers. How awesome would that be??

My morning began with a quick workout- 3 sets of stairs. Each set- single leg hops (each leg), squat jumps, 2 sprints, and 25 (ea) scissor kicks. Then I followed that with 4k on the rowing machine.

I tried to finish my workout a little bit early so I had time for a photo shoot for my pear. Food blogging at its finest. 

This is one of my birthday pears from Harry and David! Harry and David has the best pears ever. Sweet, juicy, and the perfect firmness. I seriously can’t eat any other pears.

Guess what? My duct tape solutions to my bike’s woes actually worked. My brake works fine and my basket stays in place. 

Pshhh who needs to go to the bike shop?

A couple of shots from last night?

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I do not like being locked out. Thank you car key lanyard for looking exactly like room key lanyard.

I had to walk to the library last night because my bike key is attached to my room key…which was in my locked room. But at least I got a nice picture!

My Big is seriously awesome. How great is this? 2 of those pictures are Lilly. Can you find them?

So this morning, my flowers all of the sudden looked….really really bad.

This thing drinks like crazy, I even watered it yesterday! I swear I’m not a bad plant mama!

Today was such a nice day. I got to pretend to be on the quidditch team and ended up with a free Ike’s sandwich. If you aren’t from CA, you probably don’t know what Ike’s is. If you are from this area, you are incredibly jealous. It was veggie with garlic and pesto!

And since we’re on the topic of food…

Guacamole complements of my Big. She gave me the MOST PERFECT avocados, and since I have guacamole mix, this whipped up to be a great snack!

The other half was used for dinner on my egg scramble with pesto.

See how much better the flowers look already?? Phew.

Now let’s get to the meat of the post. Today in Psych, we had a lecture on the Psychology of Health. Did you know that when you are stressed, you are way more likely to get colds? Ok, you probably knew that. But there are tons of other interesting studies. Apparently, you get sick more when you’re lonely as well. What I don’t get is how the researchers got the approval to administer the cold virus to tons of people…I would not want to participate in that study! Anyways, when you are stressed out, it is as if your body is in a continual fight or flight response. Cortisol has signals for the cells in your immune system that kill them off. Basically, your body focuses on the fight or flight issue, and conserves energy by shutting down your immune system. Yep, sounds about how I got Mono. Crew 5 hours a day, no sleep, and no clue what was going on? Yeah.

We also talked about the amazing benefits of exercise. Exercise can significantly reduce depression and anxiety. It has been shown to work as well at alleviating clinical depression as anti-depressants. How cool is that? This whole lecture got me thinking. What stresses me out? What is valuable to me? What makes me unhappy?

I realized, I exercise most days. I do hard exercise. That is awesome. I need to appreciate myself more, and what my body can do for me. I need to appreciate the world more. I feel like this past week I’ve really had my head in the clouds. I do feel like I got quite a bit of schoolwork done, but not a lot in terms of social interactions (which are SUPER important). And although it was technically a good week, it was just kind of blah.

The takeaway? I am trying to look at everything with a super positive light. I want to experience things more, and stop being concerned by the things that really don’t matter that much in terms of everything else.

I have some fitness goals that I set for myself. I had a reward planned for each goal. But I simply wasn’t meeting them, and it was getting extremely frustrating. So I decided to stop being so hard on myself, and appreciate myself for what I can do. So I went out and bought the first item on the list.

Did I need these? Absolutely not. But I decided that they are going to be my Happy Pants. They reflect a decision I made to appreciate and celebrate myself (wow that sounds incredibly selfish…). When I wear them, I want to remember that. On a different note, I am smack in the middle of the midterms. And I want a bit of time to myself to try and figure some things out. Anyone interested in doing some guest posts for next week? Shoot me an email at astottler@gmail.com.

Thanks guys! I’ll leave you with this-my current phone screensaver.