5. Let’s Talk about Stress
Stress is an unavoidable part of post-secondary student life, but it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. This section helps participants rethink stress and consider how it can help them. It also uses the Wellness Wheel to examine healthy ways to cope with stress.
These slides are available for use with this section of the presentation. For information about downloading the slide deck, see the Introduction.
One of the most common challenges students face is stress. While stress and mental distress is part of the human experience, and definitely part of the post-secondary experience, people cope differently with stress, depending on their background, environment, relationships, and specific circumstances (e.g., living with an illness). In similar situations, two people may experience stress differently.
Rethinking Stress
You need to take on reasonable challenges to help condition your brain for responding to stressors in order to become more resilient.
The stress response is a response that your body can use to prepare you for a challenge. As post-secondary students, it’s important to remember that you are here to learn and to grow, and with that comes challenges. If you experience the stress response as an opportunity to adapt, you can make stress work for you and help support your growth and resilience.
Remember:
- Stress is part of the post-secondary experience.
- The stress response is normal. It signals our body to adapt.
- Each time we adapt to a daily stressor, we develop the skills to be more resilient and cope with stress the next time.
Video: Why Stress Is Good for You (2:32 min.)
This short video from Scientific American shows how stress can be viewed as helpful. (Show the video or share the link in chat): Why Stress Is Good for You.
In speaking about adapting when experiencing the stress response, we can think about ways to solve problems, try something new, or seek support. For example, you might feel stressed about starting classes online. Initially, you can acknowledge that, yes, this is a concern, then you can then move on to planning your time/schedule, setting up your work space, connecting with your classmates, and so on. Once you put this into effect, you’ve developed a new skill that can be applied to other scenarios.
The Stress Curve
The Stress Curve shows that small amounts of stress help increase our alertness and energy for meeting challenging situations, but if stress lasts a long time or overwhelms our ability to cope, it can have negative effects.
The curve demonstrates that when performance demands are too low, we become bored and inactive. But as performance demands increase, our physiology kicks in and we start to feel alert and focused. We are motivated and we feel capable of dealing with the demands of life. However, when performance demands become too high – or we have become exposed to too many demands over a prolonged period – we become fatigued and experience a cascade of stress hormones th