Does everyone stress over exams? Yes, of course. But there’s healthy stress and unhealthy stress. There’s stress that actually helps your performance and stress that inhibits it. Once your stress reaches a certain level, it can keep you from sleeping, kill your brain cells, weaken your immune system, impair memory, put you at risk for mental illness, and more.
As I learned in my abnormal psychology class last semester, here’s a simple version of how too much stress can harm you:
Cortisol is released when you experience stress, and it goes to the hippocampus, which has cortisol receptors. The hippocampus helps turn off the stress response. If you experience prolonged stress and cortisol keeps flooding the hippocampus, the cortisol can kill its cells. If the cells in the hippocampus are killed, it’s less effective at stopping the stress response, and a vicious cycle begins.
If you’re like me, learning this is probably stressing you out more. However, the good thing is that there are so many ways to reduce stress. I chose to start by targeting school stress. There are things that cause long-term stress like breakups or deaths. Those are harder stressors to control, but exam stress is more manageable. There’s just one thing I tell myself to keep from stressing too much over school: I’m doing the best that I can.
Over time, I realized that I have to accept that I’m doing the best that I can when it comes to schoolwork. Yes, I obviously get a little stressed sometimes, but I never let it reach the point of affecting my health. A little adrenaline to help me focus is good but worry that keeps me from sleeping is not. When it’s the night before an exam or when I’m sitting in my seat waiting to receive the test, I remind myself I did the best that I could do and that I’ll have to be ok with that. I still end up doing well on my exams and probably better than I would have done if I had let myself get too stressed out.
Give yourself a break. Study. Stay on track. But allow yourself some rest time too. Don’t beat yourself up if you watch a couple episodes of Netflix. No one can work for days without breaks. Doing your best doesn’t mean abandoning your social life and neglecting your health.
I know it’s easier said than done to just start telling yourself you’re doing your best and make your school stress disappear. But if you keep trying to convince yourself of that, you’ll eventually start actually believing it too. Taking care of your health and well-being is way more important any exam.
As for other more prolonged stress, it’s important to manage that too. While it may be more difficult to get rid of, there are many techniques proven to help reduce stress. My personal methods of stress relief include taking walks alone, talking about the issue with friends and family, taking time for my hobbies like photography, and just some simple deep breathing for a few moments. For more information on how stress affects you and what you can do to keep it under control, check out this article.
Everyone has stressful things going on in their lives, but if you can learn to control this one schoolwork stressor, it’ll help your mental and physical health more than you could imagine. Don’t forget to cut yourself some slack. You’re doing the best that you can do with your schoolwork. Everything will fall into place.
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