Your Fond College Memories Will Likely Delete Those Stressful Days
By Ryan Trostle

In today’s society, stress is something that is implied. Everyone is going to have it and they are going to have to try and deal with it. Stress is not going to be cured anytime soon, and no matter what stage of your life you are in, stress will always be that little beast that is haunting you. Stress is developed from everything; your job, the kids, you family, pressures on doing better, even thinking about times to walk you dog. Most of the time these all can cause some severe stress. They don’t always have to though; I think a lot of it has to do with the way you perceive the issues at hand.

Most people think back about their college years as times of fun and games. Laughs were always accompanied with friends and grades seem to disappear when thinking back on this past. It seems to me that people always want to be somewhere in their past that they are not anymore. Do people forget about the tedious amounts of work that they used to have to do? While some of the issues are still the same, such as relationships, many have changed completely. Your college years are very stressful, no matter what you want to think later in life. The main issue is how you manage that stress. Even if that stress is in college or fifty years later.

The University of Florida Counseling Center released five guidelines that would help students manage their stress. Understand your role in stress reactions, develop a balanced life-style and effective personal organization, learn specific relaxation techniques, gain perspective on problems by discussing them, and clarify your values and develop a sense of spirituality. While these guidelines all some great, they never seem to really work. I know in my lifetime, I have heard each of these a thousand times. If we did a study about the average student that actually paid attention to these guidelines, I am sure we would find them to be far fewer than five percent of the student population.

While the Counseling Center also gives us a list of physical symptoms that you would feel when under stress, it once again resonates that same thing that we have all heard for the past 20 or so years. The facts are that the average student never gets the right balance of food, sleep, exercise, school, and recreation. So, they are never going to be as healthy as they were during the high school years. Moving out on your own can be a stressful but also exciting time. You can give the student all of the relaxation techniques that you want, but until they decide to manage their time better, nothing is really going to change.