College can be stressful. You can easily get anxious trying to juggle school, work, friends, and family while trying to figure out the rest of your life. Most of us bounce back. But frequent, intense, and uncontrollable anxiety that interferes with your daily routines may be a sign of an anxiety disorder. Causes? Schoolwork, they all replied. Money. Relationships. The more they thought about what they had to do, the students said, the more paralyzed they became.Anxiety has now surpassed depression as the most common mental health diagnosis among college students, though depression, too, is on the rise. More than half of students visiting campus clinics cite anxiety as a health concern, according to a recent study of more than 100,000 students nationwide by the Center for Collegiate Mental Health at Penn State.
Nearly one in six college students has been diagnosed with or treated for anxiety within the last 12 months, according to the annual national survey by the American College Health Association.The causes range widely, experts say, from mounting academic pressure at earlier ages to overprotective parents to compulsive engagement with social media. Anxiety has always played a role in the developmental drama of a student’s life, but now more students experience anxiety so intense and overwhelming that they are seeking professional counseling.
As students finish a college year during which these cases continued to spike, the consensus among therapists is that treating anxiety has become an enormous challenge for campus mental health centers.Like many college clinics, the Center for Counseling and Psychological Services at the University of Central Florida — one of the country’s largest and fastest-growing universities, with roughly 60,000 students — has seen sharp increases in the number of clients: 15.2 percent over last year alone. The center has grown so rapidly that some supply closets have been converted to therapists’ offices.More students are seeking help partly because the stigma around mental health issues is lessening, noted Stephanie Preston, a counselor at U.C.F.
A disturbing trend in college student health is the reported increase in student stress nationwide. Stressors affecting students can be categorized as academic, financial, time or health related, and self-imposed (Goodman, 1993; LeRoy, 1988). Academic stressors include the student's perception of the extensive knowledge base required and the perception of an inadequate time to develop it (Carveth, Gesse, & Moss, 1996). Students report experiencing academic stress at predictable times each semester with the greatest sources of academic stress resulting from taking and studying for exams, grade competition, and the large amount of content to master in a small amount of time
When stress is perceived negatively or becomes excessive, students experience physical and psychological impairment (Murphy & Archer, 1996). Methods to reduce stress by students often include effective time management, social support, positive reappraisal, and engagement in leisure pursuits. Leisure satisfaction is defined as the positive feeling of contentment one perceives as a result of meeting personal needs through leisure activities (Seigenthaler, 1997). Although relationships among some leisure domains and perceived stress have been studied in a variety of settings involving retirees to school-related settings relationships between leisure satisfaction and academic stress of college students have not been addressed directly. The only scientific research that specifically related leisure satisfaction to academic stress was that of Ragheb and McKinney, who established a negative association between academic stress and leisure satisfaction. A limitation of this study, however, was that it measured academic stress using seven items that were extracted inclusively from occupational stress inventories.

The concept of time management is generally defined in terms of clusters of behavior that are deemed to facilitate productivity and alleviate stress (Lay & Schouwenburg, 1993). Effective time management strategies increase academic performance and are frequently suggested by academic assistance personnel as aids to enhance achievement for college students. Productive study methods are characterized by "time management" and "strategic studying" (Entwistle & Ramsden, 1983; Kirschenbaum & Perri, 1982). Although programs emphasize starting large tasks well before due dates, breaking down large tasks into small ones, and doing small tasks on a regular schedule, students regularly ignore these techniques and find themselves in great distress before exams.
Research has reported evidence for the multidimentional nature of the time management construct (Britton & Tesser, 1991; Macan, Shahani, Dipboye & Phillips, 1990). In the present paper, time management was conceptualized in terms of setting goals and priorities, the use of mechanics (like listing priorities), preference of an organized workplace, and the perceived control of time. These components of time management were taken from Macan, et al. (1990).The above literature suggests that the tendency to structure one's time and leisure satisfaction may be an important factor in reducing academic stress. The purpose of this study was to examine the interrelationship (and predictors) of college students' academic stress with anxiety, time management, and leisure satisfaction. It was hypothesized that academic stress would show a significant positive correlation with anxiety, and a significant negative correlation with self-reported time management behaviors and leisure satisfaction of college students. A person engaging more frequently in time management behaviors will report fewer physical and psychological symptoms of stress. The greater satisfaction with leisure that students indicate, the lower their perceived academic stress will be. A secondary purpose of this research was to examine the differences in the study variables by gender and age. Since college women and older students report better time management skills than college men and younger students we hypothesized that females and older students would have effective time management behaviors and consequently less academic stress and anxiety.
The sample consisted of 249 full-time undergraduate students at a Midwestern university. The sampling frame chosen was the University Registrar's directory of address files that provided an up-to-date address list of students by gender and class status. Respondents were randomly selected from the directory. Information was collected using a self-administered, voluntary, and anonymous questionnaire. Of the total 593 surveys randomly selected and mailed to the respondents, 249 completed questionnaire were returned, yielding a response rate of 42%. Consent for participation was obtained prior to the survey. The sample was 91% white, which was representative of the university. Preliminary analysis indicated no statistically significant difference in the demographic information between respondents and non-respondents except in their age and gender. More females and sophomores responded to the survey. The average age was 21 years, and the majority of the sample were females ,74.6%, sophomores ,36%, and attended religious activities regularly 75%. In regards to health behaviors, 25% were smokers and 72.6% consumed alcoholic beverages (had one drink) in the last week. Most students reported bingeing alcohol on the weekend.
Academic Stress: Gadzella's Student-life Stress Inventory is designed to assess the students' perceived academic stress and reactions to stress. There are 51 items arranged on a Likert response format (1=never true to 5=always true) that assessed five categories of academic stressors (frustrations, conflicts, pressures, changes, and self-imposed), and four categories describing reactions to stressors (physiological, emotional, behavioral, and cognitive). Validity and reliability of the instrument have been reported earlier (Gadzella, 1991; Gadzella, Masten, & Stacks, 1998). The items were summed for each subsection to get a total score in all nine categories. A higher score was indicative of greater stress and reactions to stress. Internal consistency estimates ranged from 0.69 to 0.82 on the nine categories in the present study.
Leisure Satisfaction: Beard and Ragheb's (1980) Leisure Satisfaction Measurement was used to gauge students' leisure satisfaction. The instrument contained 51 questions ranging from "Never True" (1) to "Always True" (5) and assessed six leisure satisfaction components: psychological benefits, educational benefits, social benefits, relaxation benefits, physiological benefits, and aesthetic-environmental rewards. A higher score was indicative of greater benefits from leisure activities. The present study obtained an alpha reliability of 0.95 (subscales ranged from 0.85 to 0.95) as compared to 0.93 reported by Beard and Ragheb (1980).

One of the most common problems facing college students is anxiety. Certainly the added pressures of being in a new environment, being away from home and the stress of wanting to do well in college can overwhelm some people. Anxiety disorders are among the most common or frequently occurring problems facing college students. Typically, anxiety disorders involve disturbances in mood, thinking, behavior and physiological activity. In the college student they may take many forms. Often they present as adjustment disorders with anxious features, test or performance anxiety, social phobia, or substance induced anxiety disorders. Like depression, anxiety disorders and panic disorders often run in families. Therefore, genetics, biochemical and environmental factors may all be involved. It is important to remember that with help the symptoms are treatable and you can learn alternative ways of coping with anxiety. It is usually not very helpful to pretend that anxiety will simply go away on its own.
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