Me? Suffering from Stress?

Pramila is a bright, cheerful thirteen-year-old who takes the world in her stride. An extrovert, she was at the top of her class excelling in virtually every field. But when exams came round, she fared badly. No one could understand the reason for her non-performance, specially when she had done so well in class. Everyone, teachers, parents, even school friends expected her to do very well.

Few realised that that was precisely the reason for her mediocre performance. Under great stress to prove herself to the rest of the world, Pramila simply collapsed under the burden of great expectations.

Today, stress in the modern world not only leads to poor performance but is known to be one of those silent killers affecting particularly those who work in a highly result-oriented environment. We have heard so much about stress but what does stress mean to the lay person? In simple terms, stress marks an individual’s inability to cope with the demands made by the environment.

Eminent psychologist Lazarus mentions that an individual’s stress depends on how the person interprets or reacts to what he thinks of as a harmful, threatening or challenging event. And each individual tackles situations differently according to his or her mental makeup.

Stress and its implications was first discussed scientifically by Nans Selye in 1946. He divided stress into various stages such as alarm, the first reaction followed by a stage of resistance in which an individual tries to adapt herself or himself. Finally adaptation energy is exhausted, resistance level begins to decline and the organism collapses.

Each of us has a self regulatory mechanism which identifies a goal followed by activities that motivate us to achieve that goal. The outcome of these activities may or may not reach one’s level of expectation and satisfaction. This creates a balance or imbalance in our system leading to stress. This can be illustrated like this.

Now look closely at the graph below. Can you decide which is a good feedback loop: the one with the positive homeostasis or the negative homeostasis? Positive naturally! is the normal reaction.

Well, not exactly, because if the homeostasis is negative, stress can and will take place. But just imagine, if there were no stress, would there be room for improvement? Or would you then be forced to rethink your goal? Thus both positive and negative levels push you towards your goal and make you set higher goals each time.

The level of stress, however, has to be moderate. High levels of stress can lead to anxiety and lower your performance level whereas too low a level of stress will not motivate you to work further. This has been explained by the following curve given by the famous psychologist Hebb (1955).

So highly anxious and stressed people are not so likely to perform complex tasks as well as people with a lower level of anxiety.

Students may have been unfortunate enough to experience this in their exams where a little anxiety keeps them working and alert and too much results in disorganisation of thought and performance. Beyond a point stress becomes “distress”. What acts to produce distress varies greatly from person to person and whether the environment is a more potential cause of stress or the individual himself has been an ongoing debate. It is a question of which one is to be blamed more!

Effectively speaking, an individual would rationalise by saying it is the environment and cognitively speaking it is the individual himself, how he perceives stress. However, both the environment and the individual together play a role in the causation of stress and to what extent he can cope with it also depends on the individual’s ability and vulnerability. Thus, the physical, environmental and social causes of stress are all termed as stressors. Students are faced with a major stressor which could be labelled as the ‘academic stress’.

For example, with the result fever being in the air and most of the results being out, the students are now coping with the aftermath of it. Here are a few questions which will help you to think whether you are dealing with stress in a healthy or unhealthy manner:

Do you frequently allow judgement and evaluation by others to affect you?

Are you still pondering over your marks and whether they are up to your expectations?

Are you generalising your current marks with your overall level of competence?

Do you see your future as negative and wondering why in the world you did not study well?

Do you say to yourself that irrespective of the current status you do have a positive and optimistic viewpoint?

Do you think that you could think objectively and learn from your faults and look towards improving them?

You are quite confident of your success and this was just a passing phase.

Check for yourself and find out to how many questions you have answered in the affirmative of negative and if you do need to get away from the negative thoughts and focus on the positive ones you would have to be aware of your thoughts to deliberately try and change them.

Stress can always be ‘de-stressed’, wherein:

one can be aware of the internal and external demands, be aware of the personal resources to cope with demands

recognise one’s limitations

take a problem-solving approach, identify, analyse and evaluate the problem, generate maximum solutions and applying the right solution.

prepare oneself better to face the stresses like anticipation and preparedness

take time and work on management.

plan and organize

One also has to be aware of some dysfunctional patterns that are likely to produce further problems. This could happen due to lack of knowledge and lack of recognition of the stress inducing problems; lack of learning from previous experiences of life; lack of preparedness to face the anticipated stress and allowing the problem to spiral up or avoiding situations which produce anxiety; and having irrational and negative thinking are all major factors leading to stress.

Improvement becomes handy when you know the areas to improve and tapping the main areas would help one to know where you could improve.

There could be four such main areas

Reading

How can a simple exercise such as reading help improve your performance? Well, the very first step of the learning stage is reading. Reading well helps improve your understanding, your vocabulary and spelling as well.

Understanding and comprehending

These are the next steps to look into. And if the doubts are clarified immediately, it certainly helps.

Memory

Reproducing what you have written either through writing or recalling the content of the subject.

Time managament and study habit pattern

See for yourself which area you need to improve upon and then focus on it.