Stress Management for College Students
Added on 2020-05-16
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Running head: ACADEMIC STRESSAcademic StressStudent’s NameInstitutional Affiliation
ACADEMIC STRESS 2Academic StressIntroduction Stress is the way or mechanism through which our bodies deal with any kind of demand or threat. According to Beiter et al (2015), these demands or threats could be internalor external and the body must respond in some way. Often, people tend to view stress as negative and would like to stay far away from it. Most people would prefer to keep off stressor and have no effective ways of coping when major threats or demands are put upon them. Research has found out that stress is not always negative. When it comes in small doses, stress could improve a person’s performance by keeping them under some pressure (Boss, Bryant and Mancini, 2016). This pressure in return leads to more yield of results. Stress generally affects all members of the society. This includes university students. Several things happen and contribute to a student being stressed up. For instance, leaving the family home, having an intense pressure to score high grades, trying to establish romantic or love relationships and for some having to find a job while in school to cater for their fees and otherexpenses. These are just a few of the possible contributors to stress among campus students. In this report, the sources of academic stress among university students will be discussed. In addition, effective solutions to deal with the stress will be provided.ContextStress is something that university students must deal with every day. By the time students seek help conditions/situations that have resulted from stress, it is usually long after stress have accumulated and caused some physical, emotional and psychological deterioration. Most students are overwhelmed with stressful situations and fell as if there is nothing they can do about it thus leading to the kinds of deterioration mentioned above. Circumstances or events that result to stress are known as stressors. Stress is not only caused
ACADEMIC STRESS 3by negative things but also the positive ones. As a result, there are two kinds of stressors: positive ones and the negative ones. University students have unique kinds of stressful experiences. Certo (2015) defines sources of stress as those circumstances or events that come in the way of people and cause them to either change or adjust the plans they had. To understand the kind of stress that the students undergo while studying at the university, a small-scale research was carried out at the Thomson Rivers University (TRU). The aim of the study was to have a general understanding of the most common types of stressors that students deal with in every day life.With such an understanding, it would be possible to come up with possible solutions that would effectively help the students cope well with stress. This report aims at discussing the main causes of stress for university students and suggest some effective solutions. These will be discussed next.DiscussionsIn this section, the major causes of stress among students are going to be disused. The first is relationships. The term relationship has been used here to mean the connections that people have towards others. These connections could result from being related by blood, marriage, etc. As Dexter, Huff, Rudecki and Abraham (2018) observes these relationships could turn out to be a source of stress especially where the student becomes a victim of relationship abuse. Abuse could be money related, sexual or physical and may manifest in ways such as seclusion. Such abuse tends to show after some period and not immediately. Relationship abuse and conflicts could be in form of conflicts with a roommate, interacting with strangers and even family problems. The student results to spending a lot of time thinking about the issue at hand and figuring a way of solving them. Consequently, the
ACADEMIC STRESS 4attention is diverted from academic work which is the University’s main goal and core business.The second major source of stress for students is personal factors. These have proven to cause so much stress to students than one can possibly imagine. They also play a very important role in the various aspects of the life of a student. These factors are different for each student and result in different set of perceptions attitudes and behaviours. Personal factors take different forms which all tend to stress up the student and divert their attention from academics. Some of these forms are going to be discussed next. One is change in living environment. having to move from home to school and meeting new people who are so diverse may cause stress. Another form is change in sleeping habits. Campus students changetheir sleeping patterns drastically especially due to academic workloads leading to stress. According to Gonzalez and Miranda (2014) health problems and poor eating habits also significantly contribute to stress. The other personal factors include financial difficulties which a significant number of students go through and combining job with studies. (Heckman, Lim and Montalto, 2014).The third major cause of stress are academic factors. These are activities within the curriculums that students go though on daily basis. Along the way, they potentially cause stress. For instance, increased class work load. Such an increase means that the student must deal with more than they can comfortably handle. Since they want to get good grades, students will create tight schedules to deal with these assignments, projects etc (Ju, Trebinjac,Bannon and Papaconstantinou, 2017). Since the tasks are enormous, they end up messing with them. Consequently, there is poor performance which is completely different from the expectation of the student. This results to frustration and stress. This is especially true where the students must attend to tasks of different courses each of which requires their attention. Matters are made worse by the fact that most students will have to do this after a tiresome
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