The Best Ways To Deal With Academic Stress
Academic study can obviously be very rewarding, for all kinds of reasons, but it can also be stressful. Many students find the pressure of exams, studying and essays to get too much, especially when juggling studies with work, family and a social life. Education is important, but it can be hard work. If you’re finding it stressful, here are some tips to help you cope, so your studies don’t suffer.
What Is Stress?
To combat stress, it can help to understand what it is and what causes it. Stress is the body’s reaction to a change with physical, mental and emotional responses. Stress is normal, but can have an impact on your health. Stress can be triggered by your environment, your body, or your thoughts. Even good things, like a mortgage, a promotion or a new baby can bring on stress.
Stress can also refer to the feelings we get when we are under pressure. There’s no medical definition of stress, and many professionals in the healthcare disagree over whether stress is the result or cause of problems. This lack of clarity can make it hard to work out what is causing your stress and what the best way of dealing with it is. Whatever your personal experience of stress is, you can learn to manage it. You can learn to manage the external pressures and avoid stressful situations. You can also try to develop your emotional resilience so that you can cope better with tough situations that arise.
Does Stress Affect Your Health?
The body is designed to experience stress, so a small amount can be positive. It keeps us alert, motivated and ready to flee from danger. However, stress can become a negative thing when it lasts without relief or relaxation between periods of stress.
When this happens, the person becomes overworked and the tension of stress builds. Your nervous system has built-in stress response that triggers your ‘fight or flight response’. This response can become chronically activated during a prolonged period of stress. This causes physical and emotional wear on the body.
Stress without relief can turn into distress. Distress upsets the body’s internal balance, which leads to physical symptoms like headaches, stomach upsets, high blood pressure, chest pain, sexual dysfunction, and sleep problems. You might also experience emotional symptoms like depression, panic attacks, anxiety and other worries. In extreme cases, stress can be linked to the leading causes of death; cancer, heart disease, lung ailments, accidents, cirrhosis of the liver and suicide.
Stress can also be harmful in other ways. Stressed people are more likely to engage in compulsive use of substances or behaviours to try and relieve the stress. This could include food, alcohol, tobacco, drugs, sex, gambling and the shopping. Instead of relieving the stress, the substances keep the body in a stressed state, causing you more problems.
What Are The Symptoms Of Stress?
Chronic stress can lead to a range of physical symptoms, including:
Dizziness
Feeling dazed or ‘out of it’
Aches and pains
Headaches
Grinding teeth and a clenched jaw
Indigestion
Acid reflux
Muscle tension
Problems sleeping
Racing heart
Cold and sweaty palms
Tiredness or exhaustion
Shaking or trembling
Weight gain or loss
Diarrhea
Sexual difficulties
If you’re noticing these symptoms, you should work to reduce your stress levels before the symptoms begin to have an impact on your health, your emotional state and the quality of your work.
What Causes Academic Stress?
Many students experience a lot of stress for a lot of students. The most obvious cause is the workload. The workload of many college courses can be very high, and it’s natural to feel stressed out when faced with the prospect of essays, projects, a long reading list, presentations and other work. Some of the work can be a cause of stress in itself. For example, those not confident speaking in public might find preparing for a presentation very stressful, whereas for others, the difficulty of working with others can make a group project a nightmare.
Balancing your workload with other life demands can be hard too. If you’re fitting your studies in around a part-time job or demands like caring for an elderly or ill parent, the demands on your time are an obvious stressor.
For some students, being away from home for the first time can be stressful too. You might feel homesick, which is of course upsetting. Learning to live on your own and fend for yourself can be a pressure too if you’re not used to it. The pressure to make new friends can be nerve-wracking as well, especially if you’re not naturally a confident and outgoing sort of person.
College life can bring all kinds of stress with it, but try to remember that there’s a lot of opportunities for good things. Education is rewarding; you can enjoy your studies, learn more about a subject you’re passionate about and expand your knowledge. When you’ve finished studying, your new qualifications can help you to be a more attractive candidate for jobs and make you more likely to earn promotions and a higher salary during your working life. Getting to send out those graduation announcements is an amazing feeling, worth all that stress.
Make Time For Self-Care
If you’re going to be in the best condition to study, you need to take care of yourself with the basics of self-care. Start by making sure you’re getting enough sleep. Go to bed earlier and leave your phone away from your bed so the blue light doesn’t keep you awake. You also need to make sure that your diet includes at least some healthy food. Stay away from harmful substances like alcohol or nicotine. Make sure your schedule includes some time to relax too, so you can unwind at least occasionally.
Giving yourself time to relax gives your brain time to process what you’re learning. Take a break and enjoy something creative to stop you dwelling on stress or school worries.
Change Your Thinking
Stress is made worse by stressful thinking, so try to learn to change your thinking to minimise this.
If you’re causing yourself stress over whether or not you’ll write that essay on time, your mind can start to build a case for you that makes your believe that your worries will come true. When you get into this state, work can become almost impossible. Combat negative thinking patterns to stop this from happening. Try to come up with examples to counter your stressful thoughts. Think of concrete ways to solve the problem you’re worrying about and to convince yourself that your worries aren’t founded on anything real.
Take Assignments One Step At A Time
Break your work up into smaller, more manageable chunks. This can be less overwhelming than trying to look at all at once. For example, if a big essay you have to write is giving you The Fear, then break the writing process down into a series of simple steps, like finding sources, writing your outline, and writing an introduction. Take on these steps one at a time to stop the whole job from feeling quite so daunting.
Make a list of what you need to do and how long it will take, and prioritize your tasks from there. This is much more manageable to cope with than trying to take on everything all at once.
Lower Your Goals
Don’t turn into a slacker, but lower your goals in order to achieve more. Get this right, and you can reduce your stress levels and boost your academic success at the same time. Instead of setting your goal to get the highest grade in the class, set a more reasonable goal of feeling satisfied with your performance. You can take the pressure off, meaning your anxiety will ease and you can concentrate on studies instead of stress. This way you can perform better if you’re not so stressed out.
Stay Balanced During Exam Periods
Never underestimate the importance of taking a break and making time to relax during busy periods like exam season. No matter how far you try to push yourself, you can’t maintain your focus constantly, and if you try, you’ll just end up with burn out. In between your studying, try to take frequent, short breaks to do something fun. After your break, you can go back to your studies feeling refreshed and ready to work again.
Even if you only break for fifteen minutes, this can be enough to help. Go for a walk, watch TV, or relax with a coffee and a chapter of that book you’ve been meaning to read. Some people find turning to childhood hobbies like coloring or scrapbooking can be very restful for a stressed out mind.
If you can learn to avoid or manage your stress, you can improve your mental and physical state, leaving you feeling healthier and calmer. Without the pressure of stress and anxiety, you can work harder and get better results from your studies. Stress may be a natural part of life, but you can manage it so it doesn’t cause problems.