Reasons for Stress:

Students usually carry a lot of stress from schools such as worrying about exams and grades, future college essays, and more. So I have conducted a survey asking anonymous students how they usually feel stressed and I have conducted a personal list of how to release stress. 

Survey Q&A:

Questions that were posed to interviewees were “How do you usually feel stress?”, “What do you do to relieve your stress?”, “What are the most pressing stress factors in your current academic experience? Why?” “How has the pandemic affected your student life?”. 

How Students Feel Stress:

Students had this to say when answering the question “How do you usually feel stress?”  They have stated that students tend to procrastinate, have anxiety, nausea, overthink when stressed.  Overthinking was due to feeling like one has made the wrong decision hefty amounts of school work and not enough time to do the work itself. 

How do Students Relieve that Stress:

To relieve stress, students would sleep, watch movies and TV shows, listen to music, socialize, or ask questions based on the assignments given to ease the confusion.   Stepping away from schoolwork and spending time on personal life is essential for well-being and having a balance is important.  Balance in life can lead to a content life. As an individual, you can work and grow as a human but at the same time, you have time to yourself to do things you enjoy. As students, it can be difficult to find that balance because of heavy workloads, especially during the pandemic where the school is constantly shifting from online to in-person. It can be hard to maintain a tight schedule. However, when it came to going to school before the pandemic, it was just as stressful. There was still stress over grades, tests, and overall future. Socializing is also a very healthy way to cope with stress since it can allow you to vent about stress with other students and distract you by talking about things you enjoy. Alone time is also very important and there are some students who prefer to be alone than socialize. You can gain advice and stories from other people about how they dealt with stress as well and it can even help you feel less alone. During the pandemic, online calls with friends and family are the best option to still keep in touch during the pandemic. Socializing also provides a sense of being safe and secure, especially with loved ones and people you trust. 

What Causes The Stress:

Students show that the most pressing factors of stress in school are IB decisions, deadlines, university applications, general workload, and tests. There are students that are worried about whether or not to go into IB from not being certain about what their future would look like. A lot of students are still undecided about their future, so taking different classes pressure to decide in the 10th grade is a heavy decision since it can impact where you go to college. Exams can also cause stress since the grade that comes out can determine their future as well. SUch as SATs,  it can also impact which colleges you get accepted into.  

The pandemic has given stress to tons of people and has impacted people in many ways and students have listed the ways the pandemic has impacted their academics including needing to be in school physically to ask questions and contact teachers, it has made students feel isolated, lazy, and feeling that they are behind. Since the home is typically where some people go to relax and be with family, it would be understandable that relaxing and working in the same environment can be difficult. 

How Has The Pandemic Affected Your Student Life:

Students show that the pandemic affected their student lives by making them lazy, isolated, and overall even more stressed since they are unable to ask for help from teachers in person. Working online has made people lazy since you are staying in the same place for the entirety of school by default. This actively demonstrates that because you are not moving from class to class like you normally would, you would feel sleepier and more likely to get distracted since you have easy access to other things. By default, the home is where you go to relax from work and spend time with loved ones. But if you mix work and home in the same environment, it would be very easy to get distracted, do something else, and become less motivated. Other students feel as though they are behind on work perhaps because of not being able to physically ask for help on instructions but also being vulnerable to distractions in the home.