Clare Sellers
April is National Stress Awareness Month, a time to recognise the ill-effects of stress and proactively search for ways to manage your own. But it also marks the near end of many university courses that sends students into a blur of deadlines and life changes that induce huge amounts of anxiety.
With a significant amount of university students nearing the end of their current academic studies, thoughts are occupied by deadlines and exams that will have the biggest impact on their degree classification; a frightening prospect for most. This unnerving pressure has the ability to have a devastating effect on the mental health of students, increasing the amount of stress one would usually be under, and that can have an extremely negative impact.
“It’s definitely made me try harder with it being the final stretch as I don’t want to regret not putting in the effort while I could.”
Thando Mahlangu, a third-year student at Liverpool John Moores University, told me: “I find this time of the academic year really stressful especially because these marks technically determine what degree I get so the pressure is definitely there.
It’s definitely made me try harder with it being the final stretch as I don’t want to regret not putting in the effort while I could.
Immediate, short term periods of stress can actually be beneficial to a person’s health and can help to cope with serious situations. However, the effects of long-term stress can be detrimental to a person’s health. Chronic stress may cause irritability, anxiety, depression, headaches, insomnia, high blood sugar, high blood pressure and even an increased risk of heart attack.
To combat stress and reduce the risk of developing the conditions above we all have our own ways of coping and minimising the effects that it can have on us.
Everyone’s coping mechanisms are different, but there are some standard practices that could help a large majority of people.
I spoke to Miss Mahlangu about her coping mechanisms to inspire other students with different ways they can combat the pressure final-year produces.
Miss Mahlangu said: “Depending on how much time I have I’ll either roller skate or socialise with friends and family to completely shift my attention.”
“If my work needs to be done as quickly as possible I’d say fresh air and box breathing really helps calm my nerves and helps me refresh my brain and complete the task. Lastly listening to music while doing my work helps me focus my attention for longer periods of time.”
Everyone’s coping mechanisms are different, but there are some standard practices that could help a large majority of people. This includes journaling, breathing exercises, taking walks and setting time aside to partake in your hobbies.
A final-year student’s stress doesn’t stop at impending important deadlines, there is also the looming end to the course which for some may mean the end of academics and the beginning of finding ones place in the ‘real world’.
…leaving the safety net of something familiar for something entirely new and perhaps daunting.
Figuring out what to do after university can be extremely stressful, it requires a lot of thought about the future as you leave the comfort of education for a job in the world that you’ve been planning for your entire university experience. The daunting hunt for a graduate scheme and the often inevitable onslaught of rejections is stress-inducing for anyone graduating, let alone one graduating into a post-COVID recession.
Miss Mahlangu expands on this: “For a while, I was anxious because I had no clue what direction I was headed after deciding my initial aspirations were no longer my passion.”
“However, I’ve now set my mind down a specific line of work and look forward to starting something new.”
For most, the end of a university course will be the first time out of academia for a long time, leaving the safety net of something familiar for something entirely new and perhaps daunting.
Stress Awareness Month should give students the opportunity to reflect on their own levels of stress and hopefully allow them to develop some new coping mechanisms to see them through a difficult period of time.
Photo by Matthew Feeney on Unsplash. Image license found here. No changes were made to the image.
claresellers
I am a 20-year-old multimedia journalism student in my final year studying at the University of Salford