Strategies to Tackle Student Stress: Moving From Panic to Productivity

With the increasing emphasis placed on exams for pupils of younger and younger age, it is perhaps unsurprising that stress is a growing epidemic among students. Whether you’re in high school, college, or pursuing an alternative to traditional higher education like apprenticeships, performing arts schools, or online nursing degrees, it can often seem like studying is just a series of increasingly stressful hurdles to get to the next stage of your education or career. Below is a list of some strategies to keep the stress of education from impacting your happiness as a person.

The Importance of Exercise

Exercise, in practically any form, is enormously beneficial to your mental health in general and stress management in particular. This is for several reasons. Firstly, exercise releases endorphins, especially one called beta-endorphin. Endorphins are the currency by which your brain pays you, as it were, for activity it thinks is beneficial (which happily includes exercise).

Secondly, it can have the inverse effect to endorphin generation; the removal of stressful hormones, and in particular adrenaline. It may seem unlikely, but academic work (or even the concept of it) can generate the same fight-or-flight response as physical danger, and thus rigorous activity – simulated fighting or flying, to a degree – can help to convince your brain that you’ve overcome that danger, even if your essay remains to be written. Plus, exercise tires you out, meaning you’ll likely sleep better. It can have a meditative side to it, especially repetitive motions like running or swimming. It can even improve your social life, so if you ever feel like you don’t have time for exercise, make time.

Sleep Right and Eat Well – Keep Your Inner Mammal Happy

As a student, it can be tempting to simply not get enough sleep. The idea being that the more hours you’re awake for, the more studying, partying, socializing, exercising, and straight-up living you can cram into your late teens/early twenties.

However, the adverse effects of sleep deprivation don’t only make you less productive – they render you much less capable of dealing with the stress engendered by that lowered productivity, too, and can lead to a decline in your mental health. There is now an emerging consensus that there’s no universally applicable “right” amount of sleep to get, but it appears that less than seven hours is generally agreed to be too little to support good mental health. The bottom line is that if you’re tired, then sleep is likely to be more beneficial than any terrible work you could grind out.

In a similar vein, maintaining a healthy diet as a student is completely vital to stress management. Not only is a well-balanced diet critical to the maintenance of good mental and physical health, chronic stress increases the body’s metabolic needs and nutrient consumption, making one more tired and less willing to curate a proper diet for oneself, thus potentially trapping a stress-sufferer in a vicious cycle of poor nutrition and therefore further stress.

Short-Term Tactics

Occasionally, stress will rear its ugly head in the form of a more acute breakdown or panic attack. When this happens, it’s important to know how to reground yourself and bring yourself back to the present with a sense of perspective. It’s never the end of the world, and being stressed won’t actually help you. There are a number of tactics for re-centering yourself in this kind of situation, and different things work for different people, but here are a couple of common ones.

Guided Imagery

This involves using your imagination to visualize a peaceful location, away from the stresses of everyday life – you may have heard people refer to it as their “happy place.” While it may sound far-fetched, if you’re willing to lean into it and really try and use all of your senses, this is a powerful function of the mind, and can be very effective at rebalancing you.

Meditation

Equally, if overwhelmed, you can try to focus on having as few thoughts as possible and regrounding yourself in your own body. People often think that meditation is a skill that takes years to master, which is true in a way, but you don’t have to commit to the long hair, yoga retreats and weird clothes to reap the rewards of meditation. It can be as simple as closing your eyes, focusing on your breathing, and slowing your heart rate down – you’ll find yourself much more in your body, and out of the abstract realm of stress.

Ultimately, though, you should experiment and work out what it is that makes you less stressed – it’s horses for courses, really. As long as you’re eating, sleeping, and exercising enough (putting the odds on your side), everything else, as is so often the case, is just personal preference.