Every student is different on handling schoolwork and getting flooded with it. Every semester and every year, teachers and students alike must handle piles of work with the only difference being one is getting graded, and the other is doing the grading. But how can they adapt to getting through the workloads every semester?
Ever semester when finals come around, students will make certain comments to each other out loud like, “Oh that’s right…finals are just around the corner! I’m gonna be super stressed out I might die” Stress is a very serious thing to go through since anybody can have it and go through their own problems with which it is causing it. But what is stress? What are the impacts positive or negatively of stress on Mercy students?
In the words of the American Institute of Stress, stress “is a natural, physical, and mental reaction to life experiences. Anything from everyday responsibilities like work and family to serious life events, such as: a new diagnosis, war, or even the death of a loved one can trigger stress.” The most common definitions and conceptions of stress usually involve physical, mental, and emotional strain or tension and a condition of feeling experienced when a person perceives that demands exceed available personal and social services.
However, who would’ve thought that stress can be beneficial to your health in certain ways? Only in immediate and short-term situations is when stress can be beneficial to your health. How can this be? Well, the AIS (the American Institute of Stress) says that stress can help you cope during potentially serious situations. They quoted more specifically, “Most people associate stress with distress — the negative kind of stress that causes discomfort and harm. However, there is also a positive kind of stress called eustress, which helps improve performance.” However, understandably, people tend to focus on the more negative aspects of stress because it is the more harmful one that tends to happen more frequently.
There are three different types of negative stress factors that can affect anyone physically or emotionally. The stress that was mentioned, or distress means “the bad stress in life, such as experiencing divorce, punishment, injury, negative feelings, financial problems, or work difficulties, that has negative connotations” as the AIS informs us. There is also a stress called “acute stress” which is the more physical side when your body attempts to defend itself and becomes fight or flight. Lastly, “chronic stress” which is probably the most popular type of stress, is the cost of daily living and can also affect your physical health if left undealt with.
When it comes to Mercy University, they have some counseling links for a student to click on when they want assistance and advice on handling stress with work. They vary with counseling service links, tips on getting through a semester, and have an academic success and engagement link, but that one was meant for remote learning. One last exception is that they also do a “stress week” event to conduct relaxing activities designed to “keep students at their best during finals week.”
But is anyone aware of these events or links to assist a student with stress in Mercy University? What is there that could be done even further for Mercy to assist students during a semester?
When asked a group of Mercy students, four out of five of them were not aware of the school’s links to attempt to help students with their stress. The student that was aware in the group named Paige Norbeck, an occupational therapist, commented when asked about it, “I was aware of the links, but I usually don’t try and use them because I don’t think they’re that great.”
Another suggested advertising their stress sessions more and they should hold seminars or even dedicate one day out of each class to talk about stress and what they could do about it.
Not only this, but Mercy should provide more information for us with pointers on our negative responses with stress. More specifically, the AIS suggests three phases that we go through in distress. They are our: alarm reactions, or an initial shock caused by a stressor, resistance, or our efforts in coping with or adapting to our stressor, and exhaustion, or feeling overwhelmed and burnt from prolonged stress.
Therefore, the AIS says that in knowing this information and which ones you are dealing with can help us “turn stress into a tool for growth while minimizing its negative impact. This awareness can empower us to respond to challenges more effectively and improve our well-being and overall performances.”
For this reason being, it is important to know where we are at when dealing with our stress and what we can do to manage it, but this also means that students should use the available assistance from Mercy University and seek information for stress to identify what each student has and are going through, then take in how to best manage it and divide their work mentally.
