Causes Effects And Coping Strategies

Task:

Student is asked to research and write an 800- 1000 word extended essay on a topic which is accessible to all students no matter their academic discipline. The process is carefully staged and students are given guidance and feedback from their tutor on their outline and draft before the final piece of writing is submitted.

Students who was going on to study an MSc in Management and Information Systems at the School of Environment, Education and Development. The draft is a response to this question:

Most people experience stress at some stage in their lives. This can be especially prevalent when studying at university. Discuss the causes and effects of stress on the student population and identify solutions for coping withit.

The writing appears exactly as it was submitted and is typical of drafts our students produce. Read the draft and think about the question below.

If she was a student of yours, what advice would you give her about improving this text? Do not focus on surface errors like spelling, grammar or punctuation. Consider two of these areas:

strength of the argument criticality paragraph structure coherence &cohesion

You will not be expected to give a presentation on this, rather to talk about it briefly.

Mostpeopleexperiencestressatsomestageintheirlives.Thiscanbeespeciallyprevalent whenstudyingatuniversity.Discussthecausesandeffectsofstressonthestudent population and identify solutions for coping with it.

Introduction

There is no denying that stress exits possibly at any time and at any place, especially one typical stage the majority of university students would do through. The stress itself is a physical feeling or force which comes from surroundings. Anxiety and nervousness resemble it somehow which clearly performs foreseeable features or even symptoms on human biological system. These might be positive or negative depending on level of stress and different people. This short essay will attempt to illustrate the main causes of getting stressful, diverse effects on students and effective solutions to manage stress.

Definition

Stress is a physical feeling or force comes from our unique surroundings. NHS (2016) defines stress as “the feeling when someone is under too much mental or emotional pressure”.

Becoming a student can be a stressful experience. Although stress isn’t a mental health problem, it can result in mental health problems like depression and anxiety (Boyd, 2016). Additionally, stress might have many profound effects on the human biological systems, some are positive and others are negative.

Causes

With regard to the main causes of getting stressful, this essay divides it into three branches: finance, student life and personal life.

For finance, studying is connected to students’ personal finances as well as budgets. When you enter the gate of university, the total budget may change gradually. For some students from rural area, they might face the pressure of schoolings that includes living expenses, tuition fees and even basic essentials; this leads to the imbalance of budget. In that case, the stress comes. Finding a decent part-time job might be proper for them to afford apart of fees and lighten the burden.

For student life, students may encounter different mental health problems. Especially international students, they tend to get home sick easier than local residents. For some of them, it is the first time to study abroad and far away from home. Mind (2013) also points out that home sick in the first few weeks at university is normal for many students. This feeling likes kind of unsettled, it needs time to adapt to new environment. Culture shock actually is also a factor for those students; you would meet and work with new international classmates and teachers on a regular basis, the different cultures between each other is going to appear as getting along with your mate. Besides, exams and deadlines are triggers of stress for the majority if students they want to graduate successfully.

For personal life, a part of students might be in trouble with the difficult relationships with parents, siblings and friends, mainly because they allocate more time on study and in return the communication chances decrease in total. So sometimes maintaining a stable old relationship is quite hard for this group of people who should concentrate on study. The stress accompanies with this situation finally.

Effects

People have different kinds of ways of reacting to stress, thus a situation that feels stressful to a person might be motivating or disappointing to someone else (NHS, 2016). It all depends on the different levels of stress people suffer, so the effect scan be positive or negative.

For the former, a number of students probably acquire an ability to overcome stress themselves if the stress level is low comparatively, as well as that, the awareness of being independent is getting stronger during the process.

For the latter, stress often distracts students from study and socializing to worry gradually. Plus, headaches, muscle tension, pain or dizziness may come with you. That’s because stress would release a surge of hormones to human’s body so that enable them to deal with pressures or threats, also called “fight or flight” response. After the pressure’s and threat’s passing, the stress hormone levels would gradually return to normal. However, if someone is always under great stress, these hormones are going to remain in body, which leads to the symptoms of stress (NHS, 2016). So you will see the stress brings symptoms on human biological system, and the good or bad result is related to the level of hormone that we can’t see ourselves.

Solutions

As far as the solution concerned, both individual and society are connected tightly with students’ daily basis. Firstly, as for individual, Boyd (2016) suggests that managing personal time effectively is quite significant method as well as planning study schedule, which can help students feel less stressed and more in control of workload. Also, Häfner et al (2015) points out that planning and scheduling their study day and monitoring goal progress might be good advice for students to increase perceived control of time and decrease stress. Such strategies might be taught indifferent ways at institutions of higher education. You may find it helpful to keep track of your commitments and plan ahead. Also, using a written planner, an online calendar or an app is a great method to keep it.

Thirdly, leisure is a significant and essential factor to reduce stress. Iwasaki (2003) mentions that it is important that giving a greater attention to roles of leisure in helping people cope with stress in order to broaden knowledge about approaches of coping. Leisure coping beliefs significantly predicted lower levels of mental and physical ill-health and to greater levels of psychological well- being above and beyond the contributions of general coping.

Conclusion

Overall, facing the stress is inevitable to anyone during the lifetime. Actually it’s external pressure that we always put on ourselves. Stress results from finance, student life and personal life respectively, which can be split into various detailed branches. As for two opposite effects, which closely depends on the level of stress you suffer. Last but not least, currently, there are all kinds of solutions for stressful patients to deal with this illness, just feel free to seek for help with any method you could employ, which would bring benefits to your well-being more or less. Only if you face it would the life be better soon.

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Reference

• Häfner, A. et al (2014) Decreasing students’ stress through time management training: an intervention study. European Journal Psychology of Education. 30(1), pp:81-94.
• Iwasaki,Y.(2003)RolesofLeisureinCopingwithStressAmongUniversityStudents:ARepeated- AssessmentFieldStudy.Anxiety,Stress,&Coping,16(1),pp:31-57
• NHS (2014). Stress, anxiety and depression. Available at: