Speak Up and Speak Out about Stress

Winning Meme of First Stress Zero Meme Contest

By Colin Jun and the Stress Zero Executive Team

One of our school organizations, Stress Zero, hosted Stress Awareness Week events from October 30 to November 2nd.  Stress Zero is one of the new school organizations in our school, established to provide solutions and helps for relieving the stress of the high school students. The body is currently developing the peer mentoring program as well as one to one / group activities to lessen the stress levels of Shanghai American School students. As part of their stress relieving activity, Stress Zero prepared "Stress Awareness Week" events for the celebration of International Stress Awareness Day. (International Stress Awareness Day event was on November 1st, hosted by  International Stress Management Association UK). 

Stress Zero hosted three main events. From Monday to Thursday, Stress Zero prepared a wall poster that students can sign their answer to the question "What keeps you going?" Through this activity, the organization aims to increase the awareness of the International Stress Awareness Week as well as continue their research about solutions for stress. A lot of students participated in this activity, and the wall poster will be hung in school within few days.  

During the Common Ground period on Tuesday (October 31), Stress Zero invited some of the Common Grounds for a unique activity. After a brief introduction of the organization, the executive team announced the start of the first Stress Zero Meme Competition. 
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In the meme competition, the organization accepted submission of funny memes through WeChat and Snapchat for a week. 22 memes have been submitted by the high school students, and the winner was announced on during Community meeting today (1st - anonymous, 2nd - Elih Hope, 3rd - anonymous). The organization examined all the memes and selected the winner through the voting procedure within the members. (More submissions of memes can be found on stress-zero.weebly.com). 

The event itself turned out more successful than expected by the club members. In an interview, Paul Kim, one of the executive members of Stress Zero, reflected on his first experience with the following : "As a relatively new organization, we believe that we were successful in reaching our goals. Firstly, we were able to publicize our club to the SAS community, allowing us to reach out to more interested people. Secondly, we were able to raise awareness about stress awareness week, a fact that would have been overlooked by almost all students. Thirdly, we provided a brief moment of ecstasy with our meme selections." 

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