February « 2008 « Anxiety and Stress Management

School Stress and Tragedies

School appears to many to be a time when everything is going right for students and all they need to do is study, get good grades and learn how to be good citizens. Unfortunately, the recent events with regard to campus shootings and other tragedies fly in the face of such beliefs.

The pressures of school are felt by all students, but for some the pressures are more than they feel they can handle. It’s at these times, and even before, that efforts need to be made to reach out to these students to help them see that there are solutions for problems, pressures can be handled and help is there for the asking. It is, however, it is this “asking” that may prevent some students from getting the help they need.
How can schools, teachers and parents approach this dilemma and attempt to short-circuit tragedy? The first step must be to recognize where the pressure is coming from and then we can look at ways to help.

Stress in school comes from several areas: schoolwork, expectations of parents, the student’s expectations of themselves, and personal relationships. There may also be times of the year when this stress is greater than others. For instance, just around mid-terms and finals time, holidays when students are heading home, or at graduation time. These are all prime stress times because of the added pressure to achieve, the loss of person contacts and support and the new challenges graduates face.

The time to help is when students just enter their school activities and I would urge that all students receive on-going workshops, stress refresher training, and that the counseling office make itself known on a daily basis. We can’t always expect these students to come to us and we have to begin to go to them. It’s really a mission to reach out to students and their parents because the two, working together, can be most effective in helping.

Things to Remember

Keep the following in mind:

There are no “failures” in life or coursework; everything is a learning experience
Being stressed is a part of life and there are things you can do
Give yourself some mental distance from the problem and talk it over with someone
Asking for help, no matter what the problem, is always a good, positive move
Nobody’s perfect

Pin this list up on your desk or the refrigerator or paste it on the wall and look at it daily. It’s one way to help you keep a healthy focus on things.

Are you feeling stressed in school? Know someone who is? Try a visit to our support group or discuss things with other members on our Health Cafe message board.

Gunshots on Campus – Advice for Families

We send our children to school each day and our older children go away to college to begin learning more life skills to prepare them for their careers, their futures and to have an opportunity for independence. We always expect that they will return to us safely, but that doesn’t always happen. When it doesn’t, our faith in their safety at school is shaken, and now there’s been another shooting in a lecture hall on the campus of Northern Illinois University.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this and it’s not the first time we’ve seen it at a university. Who can forget last year’s shooting at Virginia Tech or the attack at the University of Texas at Austin when Charles Whitman climbed into the bell tower and held the entire campus prisoner?

What is the appropriate action for the school, the parents, the students and our country? No one has the magic formula, but one thing we do know is that going on with life, as before, won’t be easy, but it’s the only way to defeat the anxiety and stress being experienced. The trauma of the incident will not disappear, but how everyone responds will make all the difference.

Families are the primary support now and families must be included in any actions taken on behalf of the students. The strength they can provide for each other is not something that can be offered by schools alone.

Reassurance, not overreacting and maintaining calm is essential. The students may not experience any symptoms of stress immediately, but that doesn’t mean that the storm is over. Counseling and learning how to use this situation in a positive way is also essential. I am a strong proponent of “good from bad” and I believe we will find some good here, too.

The main thing all of us want to know is what happened and what were the factors that set this deadly plan into place. Those answers are yet to come.

Still concerned or anxious? Come join our discussion on the Health Cafe.

Are Internet Confessions Good for the Soul?

The new internet rage of posting “confessions” onto willing websites would appear, to some, to have merit in that it allows you to give “voice” to all those pent-up confessions that may be at the bottom of your anxiety, depression or guilt. But is that really so? Where’s the real upside to this and what about the other side of the coin, the dark side? Isn’t this just a perfect example of voyeurism, aka Peeping Tom Syndrome? Sounds like it to me.

Some therapists believe that depression comes from keeping things bottled up inside you and, perhaps, it can even cause things like cancer. We’ve heard that it’s good to let your rage out, too, because if you don’t, it may come back to bite you in an uncomfortable place. Are these pundits correct in their assumptions? I don’t believe so and I also have an opinion on whether confession is good for the body and soul.

The pundits assume that keeping these secrets hidden can result in an altered immune system that leaves you vulnerable to disorders and a target for diseases. I’m not sure that’s exactly the case here. We know that people who have serious illnesses, such as cancer, often feel depressed and that the depression precedes the diagnosis of cancer. But does that mean that cancer is a direct result of something that caused the depression or that cancer causes a biological change which leads to depression? Both would seem likely possibilities, but the depression causing cancer idea really hasn’t played out in the research I’ve seen.

The research isn’t as straightforward as we would like and there are plenty of studies that seem to prove some point or another. In the social sciences, we refer to it as cherry-picking, or selecting the studies that seem to prove your point. Every grad student has been called on that one. Once we look at the studies carefully, we find they don’t hold up and there were factors which weren’t considered. It’s the nature of human beings. Some will feel better after confessions and some may just feel better after a brisk walk and no confession.

But what about confessions on the internet? Isn’t it just a harmless exercise that will, indeed, lead to relief of symptoms and promote health? I’m definitely not sure here and, in fact, I think it may have more of that underbelly to which I referred earlier. Once you begin to reveal things, there will be people who will be waiting for you like a lamb going to its final reward on the dinner table. The more people out there, the greater the possibility, in fact the probability, that you will have someone stalking you, trying to find you or wanting to play with your head. Where’s the benefit in harassment?

The internet already has enough people disguising themselves as someone they’re not. The idea of “confessions” will just be too tempting for them. There will also be those who make up confessions just to shock the reader and get their joy that way. Then there will be others who will concoct incredibly horrible stories of life that will make people want to cry, only to be taken in.

Internet confessions good for your health? I think not. Something you’ll regret? Possibly.