Students Deal with Stress

Students Deal With Stress “Hey, I’m stressed of homework and studying, let’s have a drink”, said by the majority of freshmen students. Alcohol is the easiest coping mechanism to students because we are exposed to alcohol more than anything else. Throughout high school, most students are shown “the ways” of drinking. Lots of students find out the positive outcomes of drinking; relaxation, relief of stress, temporarily happiness, but they tend to avoid the negative outcomes; laziness, forgetfulness, and physical damage to the body.
Everyone has personal stressors that drive them to drinking. Freshmen have very similar and critical stressors though. Home sickness, studies, lack or loss of relationships are things that students deal with every day. With every stressor, there is a way to cope with it, without resorting to alcohol. For example, when students miss home they should try to make their new place just as comfortable and they should never be shy to call their parents. To deal with lost friends from moving on to university, make new friends!
You can still keep in touch with past friends, but making new friends while at university is an essential part of feeling happy and relieving stress while at school. In addition, joining a club or sports team helps to make new friends and is useful as a stress reliever. For example, I joined a volleyball team, and this is a good time to get out of my place to go have some fun, and forget about school for a bit, this usually results in me avoiding drinking. To regards with studying, take breaks, treat yourself and remember trying hard is all you can do, so never be disappointed if you put forth an honest effort.

There are several ways to avoid stress. Make new friends, go out for supper to avoid cooking or cafeteria food, call family and friends, have leisure times, join a team, don’t cram study, have effective time management so daily schedules aren’t so jam packed and stressful, these are all great ways to overcome stressors without using alcohol or drugs. This being said, drinking alcohol at high rates is detrimental to health, but drinking responsibly isn’t a bad thing to do. In my opinion, there is always room for a couple of beers on the weekend with friends.
There are several ways of coping with stress. Meditation, self-talk, and therapy are all coping strategies used to release psychological stress. Coping mechanisms are better than avoiding them, because these coping techniques actually eliminates stresses on your mind, while things like sports and friends just put stress away temporarily. For example, at the beginning of the year I had my childhood dog pass away, and one of my friends pass away in a car accident. To deal with this major stressor, I chose to get therapy because it was a very hard thing to deal with by myself at university.
Of course when this tragedy happened, I thought of drinking the pain away was an option, but I knew this wasn’t the best solution. Therapy worked great, it actually decreased the amount of stress I had every day and it helped me move forward with my life. Stressors are easy to overcome, find something to occupy personal time to avoid stress (sports, friends, leisure time, etc. ) or coping mechanisms to deal with them (therapy, meditation, self-talk, etc. ). Nevertheless, if these stress relievers were taught to students more, there would be less university freshmen resolving to drinking when they are stressed.
University students do deal with major and minor stressors day-to-day and they can be dealt with properly rather by overusing drugs and alcohol. Thus, promotion of stress relievers would be beneficial for the student population because it would help their health, budget and success rate. In conclusion, drinking alcohol is a very unhealthy and stupid way of dealing with stress and there are several healthier and smarter ways of dealing and coping with stress. References Fahey, T. D. (2010). Fit and well, core concepts and labs in physical fitness and wellness. (2nd ed. ). Insel, P. (2012). Core concepts in health. (Canadian ed. ).