“Mom, I’m too sick to go to school today.” We joke about faking illness to avoid going to school, but illness isn’t always faked. The stressors students face every day can be just as damaging as those faced by their parents. However, stress management for students is not as widely available as stress management for adults.
Charts purporting to show “who is affected by stress” list occupations. On a scale of 1 to 10, police officers rate 7.7 and teachers rate 6.2, but students are not rated. “Student” is not considered an occupation. Online searchers type in a phrase like “teaching job + stress reduction” and get a fair answer. Type in “stress management for students” and the answer is much less.
Too sick to go to school?
Stressors can and do make students sick. Stressors trigger the “fight or flight” response, and the body immediately prepares. Produces additional supplies of adrenaline for short-term survival. It puts functions like bowel activity on temporary hold. It redirects blood to the muscles. Dilate the pupils of the eyes to detect slight movements. The heart speeds up the supply of oxygen to the muscles. All this and more happens in a matter of moments so that we can fight or “run like crazy”.
If the body prepares and a student stands still, the body must undo its preparations. Lacking opportunity for stress management, you can get sick.
Sick enough to excel in school?
Most students find that eustress (good stress) is a positive help in school. Certainly, too much stress causes some students to freeze up during exams, but the right amounts of eustress can bring out the best in students.
While stress management for students should be geared toward specific stressors, some of them are actually eustress stressors, or could be.
Consider the following seven (7) stressors.
1. Academics: Academic pressure can be distressing if it is allowed to become so. However, through stress management, it may be the eustress that urges higher achievement. In this case, managing student stress requires building on academic successes. Rewarding top performance can encourage greater academic excellence.
2. Dating: Students’ lives involve a frequent focus on dating, so students’ stress management will need to address both the eustress and the angst of the dating game.
3. Environment: The school environment can be distressing if students are left to handle it on their own. Planned activities geared toward initial adjustment and intermittent periods of relaxation can go a long way toward introducing eustress into students’ stress management.
4. Extracurriculars: Many students naturally seek out extracurricular activities and find them a source of eustress. Others feel pressured to participate in them and suffer anguish instead. Managing stress for students requires careful selection of activities and a balance between these activities, school life, family life, and part-time jobs.
5. Peers: Peer pressure can be a source of eustress or distress, depending on how easily students give in to it. Students who want to manage stress will want to establish firm convictions and stick to them.
6. Time Management – Stress management for students must address scheduling, as a lack in this area can affect most or all other areas of a student’s life. Easier for some than others, getting into the habit of keeping a daily planner and sticking to it can take much of the angst away.
7. Parents: Unfortunately, parents themselves are to blame for some of the students’ stress. It is well known that students, as they grow older, seek greater degrees of independence from their parents. This is necessary if they are to become mature adults. At the same time, the fight can cause great anguish on both sides of the equation. If you want efforts to manage student stress to be successful, you will need to emphasize the stress of the parent-student relationship.
Students can do a lot for their own stress management simply by eating a balanced diet and getting enough sleep. They can add to that by keeping a schedule, including regular waking and sleeping hours.
The best first aid?
Exercise is probably one of the best means of managing student stress. It’s also simple. When feelings of total helplessness hit, exercise feels like a helping hand. When students feel like hitting anyone or anything near them, the exercise redirects those feelings into the appropriate channels. When students feel like their brains have stopped working, exercise can restart the engines.
These 2 simple exercises provide first aid for student stress management.
1. Get up from your seat, walk quickly to a bathroom and wash your face with cold water. Splash it six or seven times and include your eyes.
2. Leave your seat and walk for five minutes. Consciously relax your muscles as you walk, and breathe in and out deeply, as deeply as you can effortlessly.
Long-term stress management for students should include a regular, daily exercise regimen. Exercise tends to vent emotions like frustration and anger. Exercise also reduces the adrenaline caused by anxiety and produces endorphins that increase eustress.
If you’re a student, or providing stress management to students, make regular exercise a priority.
