Managing Student Stress in Higher Education

Let’s face it. Having some stress inevitable in higher education. It can be useful to help students to work harder and stay on track. However, too much stress can impact learning and lead to a decrease in studying effectively. In fact, stress has become the number one reported obstacle to academic performance.^[1]

Students experience multiple challenges and barriers during their education. Making strides towards increasing feelings of self-efficacy and empowerment leads to experiencing less anxiety and depression, resulting in achieving better academic success.^[2]

Dr. Karl Albrecht, a social scientist, outlined four main varieties of stress: time, anticipatory, situational, and encounter.^[3] These types of stress are especially pertinent to the life of a student.

Time Stress

Where does the Time go?

A Day in the Life of a Student could read like this:

“I have barely any time left in the day to meet up with friends, sleep or cook. And forget cleaning or exercise”.

Time stress happens when you feel worried that there isn’t enough time to accomplish all you need to do. Students in particular can feel time stress in a variety of ways: they may worry about being late to class, they may panic about the size of their workload, or the quality of their work if they are rushed for time.

While it may seem that there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done, at the end of the day, how we spend every second is a choice we make. So now the question is, “Where do you spend your time?” If you feel like there is not enough time for everything you need to do, sometimes you just have to intentionally and critically look at how much time you spend on different activities. Are you actually using your time as efficiently as possible?

There are numerous Time Calculators online. Ferris State University offers a Student Time Management Calculator that illustrates how many hours you have free during the week. Laura Vanderkam, podcaster and the author of “168 hours: You Have More Time Than You Think” points out that the surveys where people recall how much time they spend on certain activities usually get significantly different results compared to keeping an actual time diary, as we are prone to over- or under-estimating things from memory.^[4] Laura offers downloads of 15 and 30 minute time logs on her website to help track time. She also has a 12 minute TedTalk on How to Gain Control of Your Free Time.

As usual, there are apps for helping you analyze how you’re spending your time. As a few examples, Toggl allows you to state what you’re doing, and hit “start” and “stop” buttons to log how much time you spend on each activity. RescueTime is an app that logs computer activity, giving in-depth reporting on focus-work, communication apps, and distraction habits.

Managing Time Stress

There are numerous strategies to manage Time Stress. Let’s overview a few key techniques.

Learn good time-management skills

Ever feel like you’ve worked a full day but didn’t accomplish anything?  It’s easy to get caught up in other things. The key is to learn how to balance urgent and important tasks. Prioritizing helps you to categorize tasks that you need to focus on from those that you can put aside for now.

Many people resort to making To-Do lists of things they need to address. One of the issues with To-Do lists is that they generally aren’t organized action lists and really become sort of a catch all for things that are unresolved and that we have to eventually do. The longer the list gets, the more unwieldy and difficult to use it becomes, so you start missing key activities and commitments. This is where spending some time to organize To-Do lists can be helpful.

First make a long list of all the things in your life – whether urgent or not, big or small, personal or professional – that needs to be completed.

Next, take a look at all of these items and consider: is it really important in the big scheme of things right now? If not, delete it from your list, or move it to another one for review another time.

Finally, review the items that remain on your list. Sort and group together those things that are part of a larger project. Once you have these narrowed down, prioritize each of these parts in order of importance.

The Eisenhower Matrix, also termed the Urgent-Important Matrix, is a task prioritization strategy that you can use to determine what’s important and what’s not.^[5]

If you don’t feel like you have enough time to do what you need to do, learn how to make more time in your day. This might mean getting up earlier or working later in the day when you have time to focus. That being said, it’s important to prioritize what you need to do during your most productive times of day. If you are the person that has drive in the morning but not the late afternoon, leave less important tasks for those times when your energy is low.

Finally, learn to say no. Saying yes is easy, but you might be the one paying for it. Instead of looking at it as disappointing others, think of it as making time for yourself. If you just don’t have the capacity to do something, be polite but assertive, and just say no!

Anticipatory Stress

Anticipatory Stress occurs to a larger extent when we think about things that may happen in the future, or to a lesser degree when we are thinking about all that we have to do and are overwhelmed with just thinking about it. If a student is feeling anxious about an upcoming test assignment or presentation, they are experiencing a specific form of anticipatory stress. If they have fear or uncertainty about the future in general, that is more indistinct. Students can experience this type of stress when they’re making decisions about what they are going to do in their life after graduation.

Managing Anticipatory Stress

Anticipatory stress is based in worrying about the future. Looking at all of the possible outcomes and considering alternative paths can help make you feel like you have more control. For example, if you’re stressing about a presentation that you’re giving next week, why is that? Are you afraid you’ll cave under pressure? Unsure of what questions will be asked? If you were able to practice more and be prepared for tough questions by having someone quiz you, you’d likely feel better prepared for it.

Situational Stress

Situational Stress is one of the most common types of stress we experience, and we can experience it daily in varying intensities. It’s the worry and anxiety that we have about things that happen either to us or around us, and it usually occurs unannounced and is out of our control. Many of us cope pretty well with it; however, it becomes a problem when we don’t produce a resilient response to it. Mild situational stress affects everyone differently. Maybe you’re stuck in traffic, or your car won’t start and your final exam starts in 30 minutes. This might cause panic for some, or others may shrug it off, knowing it’s out of their control. More significant situational stress occurs when there is an upsetting or alarming situation that is out of your control such as an accident, a family emergency, or something like COVID-19. Situational stress does have the potential to become chronic stress.

Managing Situational Stress

Are you a worrier? A panicker? Learning to be more self aware by recognizing what your body is telling you when you’re under stress will help you manage situational stress. Do you get tension headaches? Do you feel like lashing out at someone and have to bite your tongue? Try some relaxation techniques to recover some calm and control in stressful moments. Choose your battles. Learn how to say no and avoid having stressful people in your life. Learning about conflict management skills can help you handle conflict when it happens. If your natural inclination is to withdraw or you aren’t assertive, take some training to learn how to think on your feet during situations like these. Or, if your inherent response is to get angry and yell, then learn techniques to help you manage your emotions. Ultimately, learning not dramatize things or to beat yourself up over situations that are out of your control can help you decrease situational stress.

Encounter Stress

Encounter stress happens when you have anxiety regarding seeing certain people, either alone or in a group. It might be that you don’t like them, they don’t like you, or that you don’t know what they are going to do. It could also be that you’re an introvert and being around other people makes you uncomfortable. For students this might range from intimidating professors to unfamiliar classmates. This type of stress can also occur when you feel drained from interacting with too many people during your day. Introverts especially can feel drained by people who feel the need to talk all the time.

Managing Encounter Stress

Understanding what your people-skills are like will help you with encounter stress. Emotional intelligence is the ability to know your own emotions, wants, and needs, as well as understanding those of others. This is a critical skill for teamwork and for building good relationships. People with high emotional intelligence generally have a greater sense of self, are able to think before they react, and have more empathy for others. Empathy of course, is an important trait that helps you view situations from other peoples’ perspectives. When you’re close to reaching your limit of dealings with people during your day, try to take a break. Going for a walk, engaging in a short distraction, and practicing deep breathing exercises can help. If you would like to assess your own emotional intelligence, there are numerous resources available online. One that you can calculate yourself is this 50 question quiz. Another one that is calculated online is this 15 question quiz.