Psychological Roundtable

Author: Feng Zheng, Zhang Yao / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: When a person moves to a new environment, to a completely unfamiliar place, they inevitably need to switch their roles and mindset. It's natural to feel uncomfortable at first. Anyone entering a completely unfamiliar environment will experience some anxiety and unease—this is perfectly normal. Many students struggle with adaptation when they first enter university, which is a personal emergency issue for them. However, if they become too anxious about it and develop an unhealthy mindset, that is incorrect. Everyone must find a way to cope with their environment and eventually adapt.
Generally, when facing a completely unfamiliar environment and feeling out of place, we should approach it from two aspects. First, all of our actions must have a bottom line. In his book My Life, Clinton once said, "When you're on top, the law is your bottom line; when you're down, morality is your bottom line." When dealing with unfamiliar situations, even if you're in immense pain and find it unbearable, you must have your own bottom line. At the very least, you cannot give up your life. Everyone should cherish their life. The student who jumped off a building because he couldn’t adapt to dorm life crossed his own bottom line in that situation, abandoned his life, and also brought great harm and pain to his family and those who cared about him.
Second, when our living environment changes, we should cultivate our coping mechanisms. When facing environmental changes, we typically go through a process of reaction. First, we feel lost; then, we instinctively try to minimize the significance of the change to ourselves. Next, we begin to feel pressure—the invisible stress the change imposes on us. Fourth, we face reality, change ourselves, gradually adapt, and summarize our own experiences. However, many students fail to change themselves at the fourth step. After feeling anxious, their reaction is, "What's wrong with the environment? Why is it treating me like this?" They feel the world is unfair. In reality, any change means we must abandon one way of life to adapt to another—a completely natural phenomenon in life. Changes in life are very normal, and everyone often has to alter their circumstances, which means facing a change in lifestyle.
Leaving parents and going to university alone is a small environmental change in our lives. Therefore, we shouldn’t make this change seem more significant than anything else and think we can’t handle it. We must learn to transition from one way of life to another. (Chen Haichun's commentary) P8-9