Surviving the Storm: How I Coped with School Stress and Anxiety

Stress-management activities for students that help.

Stress surrounds us everywhere, sometimes accumulating so seamlessly that you don’t even understand how you’ve got into such a bind. For me, the most stressful period was college admission and the beginning of my studies. I felt terrible but ignored those alarming signs and moved on, focusing on the classes as much as possible.

So:

After a couple of months, I ended up with panic attacks and a month in therapy.

That was a life-changing lesson for me — stress should never be underestimated, as this poison is slowly killing your sanity and paralyzing your performance.

Here, I am sharing my personal story of destructive and proactive strategies for managing stress to help you avoid my blunders and care for your mental health effectively.

Where Does Study Stress Come from?

Let’s start from the basics. Where does stress come from? In fact, college life itself is awfully stressful, as it’s a new experience distinct from everything you’ve known and have been accustomed to before. Not everyone is good at adjusting, and the process may be slow and problematic.

Besides:

Many students start their independent lives by leaving their family home and moving to another city or country. Thus, the study stress gets amplified by the feeling of loneliness and the absence of family support.

All in all, I have singled out the following causes of stress:

• High academic workload. College studies are tougher than those in high school, with more home tasks and a quicker pace of educational work.
• A new level of responsibility. Students face new duties as adults.
• Need for independent planning. Students who leave their homes for studies may be unprepared for self-paced life scheduling across all domains.
• Independent living challenges. Routines like cleaning a room, cooking food, and buying supplies are new to many students.
• Mounting expenses. Living alone always comes with greater financial expenditures, taking a toll on the student’s well-being.

One thing you should keep in mind is that a certain amount of stress is healthy for humans.

Yet, it works to your benefit if you can deal with stress proactively and don’t let it grow into a chronic condition. Thus, your ability to self-regulate stress is a vital component of EQ that will help you deal with stresses without letting them break you.

My 3 Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms

My work with stress has been a long journey as I learned to perceive it rightly and regulate my reactions. While everyone has their own blunders on this rocky path, I’m sharing mine to give you the right direction.

#1. Rumination

I recollect a period during which I repeatedly remembered a shameful situation from my childhood.

As a five-year-old, I stole candy from a local shop (I wanted it so much that I forgot to ask my mom to pay for it), and the shop owner exposed me most shamefully.

The guilt I felt at the shop and the punishment that followed at home stressed me so much that it haunted me in the moments of stress. It took me years to learn that it’s called rumination — a psychological phenomenon of repetitive thinking about negative feelings and experiences. It does no good but only steals your energy and mood, urging you to focus on the negativity.

#2. Precrastination

Once I felt negative thoughts were taking over me, I took up multiple tasks without prioritizing and strategic planning. That was precrastination — a widespread stress reduction method that doesn’t work as expected. In many cases, it only adds to stress as the pile of undone tasks grows, and your productivity leaves much to be desired.

#3. Unhealthy Behaviors

When stressed, we’re too quick to slide into unhealthy habits.

It can be anything, from poor eating, lack of sleep, and lack of physical activity to smoking, alcohol, and drugs. What unifies all of them is that they erode your mental health further and exacerbate stress in the long run instead of relieving it.

7 Stress Management Activities for Students That Helped Me the Most

Unlike the ineffective methods above, these activities are sustainable and healthy. There are plenty of other techniques you may effectively practice, but here I name the ones that worked the best for me.

#1. Healthy Sleep

Sleep is not the first idea coming to your mind when you think about calmness and stress reduction.

Yet:

It’s one of the fundamental aspects of restoring your mental health, proven by studies and experiments. Things work as follows: stress causes insomnia that, in turn, worsens your concentration and increases irritability.

This vicious cycle needs to be broken, and the following sleeping habits can help you:

• Practice mindfulness meditation before going to bed.
• Take a warm shower or bath to relax the muscles.
• Avoid blue light exposure 1–2 hours before bedtime.
• Say “No” to alcohol or caffeine in the second half of the day to avoid the nervous system’s stimulation.

#2. Sport

Our bodies often start cheating on us during acute and chronic stress periods. You may feel less motivated to move and may want to spend more time on a sofa or eat something tasty and unhealthy. That’s a natural protective mechanism of the human body, which guides you to preserve and accumulate resources instead of spending them.

I’ve been doing those things for quite a while, and that was wrong. Sport turned out to be an excellent tool for keeping my nervous system stable and healthy, as it:

• Raises the level of endorphins.
• Reduces stress.
• Increases focus.
• Improves your mood.

After several experiments, I picked yoga on a regular basis for my well-being, balance, and moderate physical activity.

#3. Mindfulness Techniques

Mindfulness is a clue to mental health because it allows you to stop and reassess the state in which you’re finding yourself. It removes unnecessary fuss and anxiety from your thoughts and actions by adding a sober, reserved look at the life circumstances.

I recommend trying the following techniques, as they really work:

• STOP technique. STOP is an acronym for Stop, Take a Breath, Observe, and Proceed. It conceals a great philosophy of thinking before doing, which will often save you from rushed decisions.
• Breathing exercises. There are plenty of mindful breathing exercise options, like alternate nostril breathing or resonance breathing. Each of them focuses your attention on the process and breathing mechanics, helping you concentrate and remove distractions from your mind.

#4. Stress-Relieving Foods

A healthy diet is one of the formative elements of a busy student’s state of mental well-being. If you feel good on a physical level, your stress resilience will be higher. So, it all depends on the health of our guts.

Yet:

Besides healthy food consumption, we can get more by eating stress-reducing foods.

These include Omega-3-containing products, complex carbohydrates, and veggies that reduce cortisol.

For instance:

• Salmon
• Asparagus
• Oatmeal
• Berries
• Oysters
• Dark chocolate

Another effective tactic is mindful eating — the process that takes the process of eating to a new level by focusing your attention on the meal, slow chewing, and breathing in the process.

#5. Stress Diary

The best remedy for stress is a nuanced understanding of what causes it. We are all different, so we react to various triggers and suffer stress from situations, thoughts, and people differently.

A nice way to come to grips with your unique stress profile is a stress diary — it will help you identify the causes of stress and the intensity of stress felt in particular situations.

It’s essential not only to record episodes of stress but to analyze them from time to time to develop workable strategies for stress decline by removing stressors.

#6. Nature

A walk in the park has been an excellent stress-reducing remedy since times immemorial. A recent study has found that the more natural your environment is, the greater the level of stress drop.

Thus:

It’s much better to leave the busy city and walk in the wilderness to restore your mental balance and unwind.

I started feeling much better when I changed my weekend walk location from a local park to the mountain forest 50 miles away from our town. The trip is worth the feeling of total mental relaxation with which I come back every Sunday evening.

#7. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

Well, I’m sure I won’t reveal a dark secret if I say that coping with stress with the help of a competent CBT specialist is an awesome way to go, especially if you feel you can’t handle stress alone.

This therapeutic approach is a mild yet effective technique for managing depression, anxiety disorders, and even PTSD.

So, it will surely be of help in situations of chronic stress. You can seek assistance on campus and inquire about available CBT resources from your faculty.

Final Word

Here, I’ve shared what works for me or what I’ve learned from my peers. But all people are different, and what helps me can be a waste of time for you.

So:

I recommend trying several alternatives and always listening to your heart. Search for your own customized solutions and always focus on your well-being as the greatest treasure and asset you should preserve by all means.