Impact of Stress on Academic Success in College Students
Ou Jia Yin
Student ID: 13209586
New Class -1
James Cook University (JCU)
Impact of Stress on Academic Success in College Students The word “stress” is generally used to describe a state of great worry caused by a difficult situation, or something that causes this condition. Anything that poses a challenge or is a menace to our well-being is considered a stress and it can be divided into two parts. There are good stresses that gives people the motivation to do something to make their life more meaningful. Additionally, there are also bad stresses that will negatively affect their mental and physical health. People that suffer from bad stress are usually too hasty, overreact too much and have extremely high expectations for themselves. The most common stress that can be seen in teenagers is Academic Stress. According to the American Psychological Association’s survey (2014), teens routinely reported unhealthy levels of stress, and their average reported stress levels exceed those observed in adults. Teens stress level were reported to be 5.8 on a 10-point scale compared with 5.1 for adults. From this, we can see that nearly all the students, especially college students are being affected by Academic Stress. The causes of Academic stress can be analyzed into several factors. These factors include anxiety, sleep deprivation, situational problems, career direction, and previous life experiences. Thankfully, there are many ways to relieve stress. If students do not reduce their stress in the right way, it may cause serious repercussion that might impact their mental and health aspects.
Anxiety is a main cause of Academic Stress. It can be divided into several category such as achievement anxiety, social anxiety, writing anxiety and exam anxiety. Achievement anxiety usually arises when students are eager to attain the expectations of their parents, teachers or herself that are unrealistic. It can be seen more commonly in students who have siblings or are too aggressive. This type of student is more prone to compete for attention or self-satisfaction. Hence, anxiety will be doubled once they fail to satisfy their ambitions or due to early exposure to overachieving siblings or peers. Besides that, social anxiety also occurs to many students. Common forms of social anxiety include performance anxiety, public speaking anxiety, and stage fright. (Leitenberg, 1990). Some of these students possess an intense fear of how others thinking about them, in particular, of negative views such as embarrassment, humiliation, criticism or rejection, which causes them to feel insecure in comparison with others and might assume that peers will automatically reject them.
Writing anxiety is a feeling of frustration and pessimism by students toward writing. These negative feelings arise when students attempt to produce new ideas or works, and can prevent them from being successful in their writing. Expecting too much for oneself is also a reason that can cause writing anxiety when students try to create a flawless paper which is a high order. Exam anxiety is a blend of physiological arousal, strain and physical manifestations, alongside psychological stress, fear, apprehension or disappointment, which happen before or during test circumstances (Zeidner, 1998). Researchers suggest that between 25 to 40 percent of students experience exam anxiety (Cassady, 2010). Students who experience exam anxiety tend to be easily distracted during a test, experience difficulty with comprehending relatively simple instructions and have trouble organizing or recalling relevant information.
Anxiety can also be caused by the past experience of students which will also affect the level of stress experienced. For example, if a student had a traumatic experience while they were doing her presentation in high school, there is a great possibility that they would be afflicted with social anxiety when they are in college or even working. Moreover, students might suffer from writing anxiety if she keeps thinking about the criticism she has received in the past. All the experiences that students have been through are dramatically impacting their life in the present including those small experiences that might seem irrelevant or insignificant. Thus, the experiences of students in the past do play an important role on their stress of present studies life. Sleep deprivation is defined as obtaining inadequate sleep to support adequate daytime alertness (Hershner & Chervin, 2014). A study done by Yoo (2007), an assistant teacher of radiology at Harvard Medical School, demonstrated that lack of sleep alone is sufficient to arouse the brain’s fight or flight response. This response starts the body's guard systems and eases the queasiness, strain, heart palpitations, shortness of breath, nervousness and mental anxiety. Over an extended time period, this condition of uplifted readiness can modify the neural associations in the cerebrum and result in genuine psychiatric issue. Numerous undergrads are restless as they go to sleep late and wake up for classes before satisfactory rest is acquired. Lethargy and sporadic rest patterns have numerous undesirable results, one of which is to adversely affect learning, memory and execution. Understudies who are experiencing lack of sleep will not be ready to focus on her studies, which will influences her scholarly results.
Situational problems are problems that students might encounter during study periods that can cause them to be distracted from their studying. Most of the problems that students will face are in regards to family, friends and financial issues. Expectations and the wistfulness of a student’s parents could be extremely stress inducing especially if they are not that good at studying. Apart from this, friends are also a key factor that can causes students to become stress as students might feel that they are not good enough for their friends or inferior when they get lower grades than their friends. By the same token, financial problems are a big source of worry for college students too. In order to maintain scholarship requirements, a student will do their utmost and is vunerable to the effects of stress.
Career direction is also an issue to be considered before most students select the school and course they want to go. It helps students to know themselves better and which path they want to go along. Career direction has become one of the reason that causes student to feel stress too because many students are studying blindly without any purpose or aim and this has caused them to lose their motivation in studying. As a result, their academic performances will fall behind when they study without motivation. In order to catch up with the others, students will become lost and stressed and even loathe studying.
Although the symptoms of being stressed are more noticeable by others, but it is hard for the person suffering from it to become aware of it. Stresses can seriously undermine both students’ mental and physical health unwittingly. A recent study by neuroscientists at New York University (NYU, 2013) found that even mild levels of stress can impair our ability to keep a grip on our emotions. Students who are suffering from Academic Stress can easily contract bipolar disorder and depression. In addition, stress can physically damage students’ hearts muscle because stress hormones increase their heart rate and constrict the blood vessels. This might lead to heart attacks and sudden death. Besides that, stress could also lead to obesity, premature senescence and so on.
Certainly, there are a lot of ways for students to reduce their academic stress such as exercising, listening to the music, practicing yoga and so on. But the first and foremost is to overcome their academic problems. Students should seek help and advice whenever they encounter difficulties. It is important to remain positive for everything that happens and try to handle it calmly. Furthermore, students who used to be loners should learn to work with a team as it can help ease their burden and the shared responsibility will definitely reduce the stress.
In conclusion, academic stress is unavoidable during their learning journey especially in the college. It may give rise to problems or even misfortunes if students do not take it seriously. However, certain levels of stress is required for students motivating themselves. Thus, whenever student feels stress, the cause should be identified and an appropriate solution should be constructed to deal with it. Learning is a pain in the neck but ultimately is rewarding. Learning to de-stress is a skill that lasts a lifetime. So never give up easily, you will never know what you will get after going through all these hardship.
References

Cassady, J.C. (2010). Anxiety in the schools: The causes, consequences, and solutions for academic anxiety. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Even mild stress can make it difficult to control your emotions. (2013, August 13). New York University. Retrieved from http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2013/08/26/even-mild-stress-can-make-it-difficult-to-control-your-emotions-nyu-researchers-find-.html
Hershner, S.D., & Chervin, R.D. (2014). Nature and science of sleep: Causes and consequences of sleepiness among college students. USA: Dove Medical Press Limited.
Leitenberg, H., (Ed.). (1990). Handbook of social and evaluation anxiety. New York, NY: Plenum.
Stress. (n.d.). In Cambridge Dictionaries Online. Retrieved from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/stress
Yoo, S.S., Gujar, N., Hu, P., Jolesz, F.A., Walker, M.P. (2007, October 23). The human emotional brain without sleep: A prefrontal amygdala disconnect. Current Biology. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982207017836?_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_origin=gateway&_docanchor=&md5=b8429449ccfc9c30159a5f9aeaa92ffb
Zeidner, M. (1998). Test anxiety: The state of the art. New York, NY: Spring Science & Business Media.