Survival Guide: Managing Stress in College
Transitioning from high school to college is a major stepping-stone in one’s life. You separate from the people you have grown up with. You might move away from home. You learn to rely on yourself. You have to make new friends. You have to adapt to your new environment. Bottom line is, every aspect of college can be stressful.
It is difficult to not break down under stress. Everyone encounters stress. The key thing is to learn to control and minimize the negative stressors. In order to confront stressors, you must first understand what stress is. It is beneficial to understand your body, how it reacts to stress, and what causes you to be stressed.
What is stress?
“Stress” is a very broad term. There is no specific definition of what classifies as a stressor; it varies for every person. What may be stressful for one student may be a sense of relaxation for another student. For example, student A may be terrified of public speaking. Just thinking about presenting in front of an audience stresses her out. On the other hand, student B may love to speak in front of people.
Stress is a physical reaction to stressors, which can be someone or something that threatens your internal balance. Stress can be positive and negative. Stress is like a warning signal; it is your body’s way of telling you that you could be in trouble. If you feel threatened by an external stimulus, your body stimulates your fight-or-flight response. Your body will get your adrenaline flowing, increase your blood pressure, intensify your breathing, etc.
Stress also serves as a warning signal that makes you more alert and focused. If you have an essay due tomorrow morning, stress can push you to concentrate and finish...
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...eate a schedule or use a planner. You should write out due dates for assignments and exam dates. With so much on your plate, you could easily forget to do something. Within your planner, you should prioritize what you need completed first. Is going to the movies with your friend tonight more important as the essay due at midnight? Could you go with them another time? Part of prioritizing is asking yourself what is more vital to finish.
If you ever find yourself frustrated and stressed, pause what you are doing. As simple as these activities may sound, they can help a lot when you are mentally torn.
• Take deep breathes; it relieves some of the tension. It will allow you to think clearly without feeling all the pressures.
• Step outside your room. Take a break from your work, and visit the outdoors. Take a walk, get a breath of fresh air, or go for a jog.
Get plenty of sleep. Feeling tired can increase stress by causing you to think irrationally. Keep your cool by getting a good night’s sleep.
Stress means different things to different people and stress effects people in different ways. Some people think stress is something that happens to them such as an injury or a promotion and others think that stress is what happens to our mind, body and behaviors in response to an event. While stress does involve events and how one responds to them these are not the critical factors, but our thoughts about the situation in which we are involved are the critical factors. Essentially, stress exists whenever homeostasis is disturbed or cannot be maintained (Stress and the Social System Course Guide, 2013). Homeostasis refers to the body's ability to keep the internal chemical and physical environments constant. As your body begins to react to stress several changes occur. These changes include increased heart rate, blood pressure and secretion of stimulatory hormones. Ones body prepares itself in stressful situations to either stand ground and fight or to flee from the situation. Walter Cannon called this stressful reaction the fight-or-flight response (Greenberg, 2012).
Stress can come from any event or thought that makes us feel frustrated, angry, or nervous. All of us experience stress and usually cope with it well. Stress is an omnipresent part of life and is a reaction to external stimuli that disturb our physical or mental equilibrium. It is a system in our body that helps us to deal with real danger and / or perform at our best. Any event or happening that induces stress is called stressor.
Stress, as defined as a reaction to a stimulus that breaks our physical and mental harmony, is ubiquitous. However, stress has two sides – the bad and the good, in which the latter is mostly overlooked as most people suffer from the affliction of the former.
Your mind has the greatest influence towards stress so when you learn how to change your expectations and attitude towards pressuring situations, you can defeat stress easily. Stay positive. When you are caught in a bad traffic, don’t you think it’s a good time to listen to your favorite music? Instead of letting those eyebrows collide in worrying, try to calm yourself by changing the way you think about the situation.
After all of my classes, I usually spend the entire time driving home thinking about all of my assignments that need to be done. Thinking about all of these things stresses me out quite a bit, and by the time I get home, I can’t decide which assignment I want to do first. Usually at this point I go up to my room, lay on my bed, and spend the next ten minutes relaxing, and letting my mind wander. After I do this, I can immediately decide on what I want to do first, and work more efficiently. For example, when I made it home last Thursday I was thinking about whether I wanted to do writing, biology, or my water planet course homework first.
Summary: In Conclusion, the way someone perceives life can cause them stress, although some stress is beneficial, too much stress is harmful to our health, but thankfully there are many techniques one can do to reduce stress in their life.
Find healthy ways to cope with stress, such as exercise, meditation, or spending time with people you care about.
Stress is the combination of psychological, physiological, and behavioral reactions that people have in response to events that threaten or challenge them. Stress can be good or bad. Sometimes, stress is helpful, providing people with the extra energy or alertness they need. Stress could give a runner the edge he or she needs to persevere in a marathon, for example. This good kind of stress is called eustress. Unfortunately, stress is often not helpful and can even be harmful when not managed effectively. Stress could make a salesperson buckle under the pressure while trying to make a sales pitch at an important business meeting, for example. Moreover, stress can increase the risk of developing health problems, such as cardiovascular disease and anxiety disorders. This bad kind of stress is called distress, the kind of stress that people usually are referring to when they use the word stress.
Stress is a familiar word in today’s world and everyone that has to earn a living or studying can get stress easily. There are differences between stress at school vs stress at work life even stress in daily life; students nowadays are going through many pressure, mostly the stress they are dealing with appears during exam period. Simply, stress is a mental illness that contains apprehension and anxiety and was caused by problems surrounding your life. Stress can affect health and emotions negatively and it causes an issue for the body if there is no solution to deal with it, bad stress appears in a long-term and happens when life’s problems have no way to handle. On the other hands, not all stress is bad for you, some are considered good stress
First, stress is defined as an unpleasant state of emotional and physiological arousal that people experience in situations that they perceive as dangerous or threatening to their well being (Patel, 14). Stress is a universal feeling to everyone but the word stress means different things to different people. Some people define stress as events or situations that cause them to feel tension, pressure or negative emotions such as anxiety or anger (Patel, 15). Other people may view stress as a process involving a person’s interpretation and response to a threatening event. In any case, stress has many facets of how one perceives and responds to the certain predicament that is ailing them.
Stress is a natural occurrence that most every person will experience at some point in his or her life. A stressor, as defined by Potter, Perry, Stockert, and Hall (2013), is any kind of event or situation that a person encounters in their environment that requires him or her to change and adapt. When a person responds to stress, his or her coping mechanisms and actions are individualized. No two people are going to handle stressful situations and cope with experiences the same exact way. Each person is unique and has his or her own customized way of dealing with stress. While some people are very open and honest about what they are dealing with, others keep their feelings bottled up. I find this topic so
Despite that many don 't realize the dangers, stress is one of the most significant problems of modern times, causing serious problems on physical and mental health. Stress symptoms may be affecting a patients health, even though a doctor may not realize it. Don 't assume that an illness is to blame for that excruciating headache or your sleep deprivation. Let 's face it, everyone copes with stress. Sometimes stress is in our favor, but other times it could feel like stress is taking over. " Stress is a normal physical response your body uses to protect itself from challenges life throws at it each day"(Stress and Health: How Stress Affects Your Health) Stress affects everyone differently, so it 's important to understand what may be causing
The second thing you can do would be to take a break. You can take a break by hanging out with your friends, listening to music, or taking a nap.
Stress is in our everyday lives. We allow things such as the way we live, school, work, family, relationships etc to stress us out. Some people deal with stress way different from others. Some may know how to cope with stress better than others. We allow stress to take a major toll over our lives when we are suppose to fight it, but a lot of people can’t do that. Stress makes you act and do things that are not like yourself. Stress is a negative word; it comes in all different shapes and forms.