How To Cope With Your Losses

Using space, time, and new focal points in your life, you can learn to cope with loss healthily.

Everyone deals with loss in some aspect of their life. Whether it’s the death of a loved one, a relationship with a friend or lover ending, or you lose an important event in your life. While this change in your life can be disappointing and unfortunate, there are many stages and steps to overcome and deal with loss. 

First, you have to allow yourself time to grieve. Give yourself space from the situation and allow yourself to both feel and express your emotions. An interview I collected with a licensed therapist said “Grief can be a burden, but don’t let it be the anchor, know it’s okay to feel sadness and anger but don’t let it pull you into a negative space.”Allow time to grieve, but then move on and find things in life to make you happy. Go out with your friends or family, adopt a pet, find something you are truly passionate about, and focus on that. Move your attention away from the subject of grief and occupy yourself with something positive that you enjoy doing. 

Another step in the process is to seek help from your friends and family, even a counselor to share how you feel and get a support system running. This can give you comfort and peace from the situation. A therapist or counselor can also offer professional mental help if the grief has been overwhelming and unbearable. It’s important to share your grief because then you can both remember and memorialize the person or thing you lost and help honor it as an important part of your life. Remembering can further the healing process and help look back at it and know that the stage is done and you need to move forward. 

All in all, it is important to know that everyone copes in their own way. You have to find what is the best way for you. Give yourself time to feel what happened but also realize this feeling will eventually pass in its own time. You can find a new focal point in your life that brings you joy. No matter what way you decide to deal with your loss, you should take care of your mental state until you move to bigger things in your life. 

Maturely Rated Video Game Access Should Be Restricted

In the modern day, technology is constantly improving. We are almost always surrounded by some piece of “tech”. Most of the time, in the form of entertainment. However, with these constant advancements, it’s on us as a community to follow through with proper restrictions. With the amount of uncontrolled cybercrime increasing as technology advances, it is important to raise our future generations within controlled environments, including their mental environment. While making sure our children are not limited to confined creativity, it is just as important to shield their developing minds from influential propaganda. All of this poses the question if mature-rated video games should have more restrictions to guard the youth community. 

Videogames are very addicting to young minds, statistics show that 80% of popular videogames involve violence and 66% of teens are addicted to these MA games. These digital drugs easily accessible to youth can cause many drawbacks for their developing minds. Mature-rated video games include a variety of content like drug use, disrespect to the law, sexual violence towards women, stereotyping, and obscene gestures. Exposure to these themes often results in an increase in violent and aggressive behavior, stemming from the graphic content and being subjected to mature scenes. However, this is only a short-term effect. Long-term, normalizing these violent behaviors in the virtual game can spill into their real-world behavior.  Children see this content and may try to imitate or become desensitized to it. For adolescents, this negatively impacts them because they are still developing their own coping mechanisms and shouldn’t have constant emotional distress. Another thing found with violent video game addiction is a higher probability of using drugs and lower academic grades. Constantly seeing abuse of drugs in-game can normalize it and they think they should do it too. The brain is also affected, decreasing emotional response to violence and making them more numb to it in real life. Ask yourself, is this what we really want for our future society?

Implementing stricter regulations on mature video games would guard young minds from content going beyond their emotional capacity. Having these games played by a huge percentage of children changes their young perspectives and makes violence a normalized thing that can merge into their real-life perspectives. Having regulations would change this and cultivate a world of gaming that fosters empathy and responsible choices, a coexistence between virtual and real-world values. 

Works Cited

Aacap. Video Games and Children: Playing with Violence, 2017, www.aacap.org/AACAP/Families_and_Youth/Facts_for_Families/FFF-Guide/Children-and-Video-Games-Playing-with-Violence-091.aspx#:~:text=Studies%20of%20children%20exposed%20to,more%20influenced%20by%20violent%20images.

Brooks, Dr. Mike, et al. “Should Parents Let Their Kids Play M Rated Video Games?” APACenter, www.apacenter.com/should-parents-let-their-kids-play-m-rated-video-games/. Accessed 19 Dec. 2023.

Robinson, Tristan C. “Violent Video Games: Can/Should We Regulate Them?” Weaver Robinson Law Firm, PLLC, 16 Mar. 2021, www.arlingtonlawfirm.com/blog/2021/march/violent-video-games-can-should-we-regulate-them-/. 

Grodzinski, Alison. “Do Video Games Influence Violent Behavior?” Michigan Youth Violence Prevention Center, 14 Dec. 2015, yvpc.sph.umich.edu/video-games-influence-violent-behavior/. 

“Violent Video Games Can Increase Aggression.” American Psychological Association, American Psychological Association, www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2000/04/video-games. Accessed 19 Dec. 2023. 

What Highschool Is Like in 2023

High School today is modern and tech-savvy. More often I open laptops instead of textbooks and type in documents instead of writing on paper. In some cases, this can be a good thing, having instant access to the entire internet for various sources of information at just a click away. Having this technology does a great job at connecting high school students to the real world. Educational websites can also make learning more engaging and fun by having games and quizzes that incorporate the topic the students are trying to learn. This modern education system also is helpful to students who miss school and are able to upload assignments from home. Finally, computers and devices can boost productivity in a classroom. Teachers can keep due dates on sites like Google Classroom and upcoming events so students don’t forget and online books given to students aren’t able to get lost, performing as a huge time and effort saver for both parties. 
On the other side, this modern education system has quite a few downsides. Using computers and other devices can lead to physical strain like head and neck aches as well as mental issues like depression and anxiety. Another downfall is the easy accessibility of the internet. Students can easily use multiple sources to cheat and plagiarize work and it can distract them from learning. Websites used can also include misinformation that could negatively affect their work quality. This dependence on the technology being used and misused can stray students from using their creativity and original thinking. Looking back at 2020 and the extreme use of technology, it is also helpful to note how dependency on technology can take away a lot from the learning environment. Students have more trouble focusing on the assignments and there was a noticeable gap in grades in contrast to the years before. The social aspect is crucial for students to have in person much more than on an online website.
In the end, Highschool today has become very developed whether for the worse or better. Technology expands students’ access and connection to the world while giving fun ways to learn. However, this privilege can be easily abused with cheating and copying. Either way, you look at it, the internet has been very influential on students today. 
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