Copyright 2005 Trevor Dumbleton

Probably the least appreciated form of stress is college stress. This is mostly due to the fact that adults simply see a lot of college students sitting on their rear ends playing video games and drinking, instead of seeing students who are under pressure to succeed all the time. In addition to classes, homework, research, reading, paper writing and problem solving, there are now the problems of how the heck to pay for college and whether there will be any jobs waiting after graduation. Thus, with all these forms of college stress weighing students down, it is no wonder that things tend to get ugly when they “blow off steam”.

Of course, there are better ways to deal with stress than to drink an entire case of beer in one day. In fact, abusing your body with any number of chemicals does not really help that much, aside from the fact that people generally relax when they do such things. However, they are usually relaxed before partaking of the latest work of ancient and modern chemistry, so the substances themselves really do not make much of a difference.

Unfortunately, college stress is often the first encounter that some students have with persistent stress, and it is hard for them to deal with it. However, it is also the first time that many of them have had experience with almost complete freedom, so college has a double threat. Complete freedom means the ability to simply ignore the cause of stress, which is usually the classes they need to stay in college. Thus, the problem of freshmen retention in many universities.

Unfortunately, most students don’t even attempt to find help for their stress problems. In fact, the most common effort to help students through their stress is to tell them to either just get their work done or to get used to it. Of course, this advice usually comes from their friends and, though there is a certain set that could use this advice, many other students are struggling to keep up simply because they are unable to cope with their stress. Thus, by relieving their own minds of their concerns, they could help their grades and help keep themselves in school.

The best place to start looking for relief from college stress is by talking to an advisor. They are more than happy to help students because they want to help them and, for the most part, nobody ever visits them. Thus, they are very eager to help, but very lonely, so they will be more than happy to give a hand to anyone who needs it. If you are a student under stress, they can help you deal with the classroom concerns and direct you to people who can help alleviate your stress concerns. It doesn’t matter how personal the problems might be, advisors are very private, very discreet, and they are more than happy to provide you with assistance.

For those who need more regular relief from college stress, there are other options to the usual cure of barley and hops. In fact, colleges are a wealth of opportunities to learn new stress-reduction methods. For instance, there are yoga clubs, meditation classes, and even courses in tai chi that can help you learn how to cope with stress and ease its effects on you. As well, many colleges will provide stress-relief seminars every so often, simply to help their students keep their stress at bay. By all means, look for these seminars and make use of them.

Another way to keep college stress at bay is to simply budget your time properly. Yes, that means that you should actually perform that time-honored and often-overlooked stress reduction method known as “getting work done early”. This not only means getting your homework polished off and done before the day it is due, you should also attempt to start long-term projects more than one day before they are due. By spreading out projects, you can actually relieve a lot of stress. This is because you will actually be giving yourself less work to do later and you will not have to freak out at the last minute because the work is not done. Yes, I know you’ve heard this all before, but if you want to avoid college stress, you need to actually do it for a change.

College stress is a major problem for university students, but it is mostly ignored by the students who are actually under stress. In fact, they usually just try to press through their stress without considering that it does not need to keep them under its thumb. However, that does not need to be the case. Students can help themselves by simply recognizing their own college stress and making a few efforts to alleviate it.