I’m 100% certain that every student on this planet, especially those who are coming nearer to exam season, has felt stress at one point or another and very few students have trouble making it obvious how stressed they are – but is there anything good about being stressed?
There are of course many bad things about becoming too stressed, the majority of which are regarding detrimental effects on our health and general wellbeing. For example extreme levels of stress can physically damage your heart because stress hormones increase your heart rate and constrict your blood vessels, forcing your heart to work much harder. In addition, stress can make it difficult to control your emotions, make you gain weight and even make you age faster.
However is there anything about stress which could be affecting us positively?
Firstly, low levels of stress can actually boost brainpower – something students would enjoy hearing. Stress stimulates the production of brain chemicals called neurotrophins and strengthens the connection between neurons in the brain. This is the reason why stress can help boost productivity and concentration, which explains how sudden waves of stress can often encourage students to get on with what must be done.
Secondly, as strange as it sounds, being stressed can have a positive impact on your psychological state as well as your physical one. Learning how to deal with stressful situations can make future ones easier to manage, therefore increasing your resilience. Stress can also make you more motivated to succeed; thinking about a deadline can stimulate your behaviour to manage a situation effectively, rapidly and more productively. Stress helps you enter a state of heightened awareness and complete absorption into an activity. This state can be achieved at any time and is proven to be largely driven by pressure to succeed.
Finally, did you ever notice that sometimes when you are stressed, your memory seems to improve? Remember that test you passed where the answers seemed to come out of nowhere? This increase in your memory is down to stress hormones that increase your alertness when it’s most needed. Occasional stress can help sharpen your memory, which is definitely a benefit for when students are trying their hardest to cram in a whole unit of information for the next day!
Stress like this which is beneficial for us is called, ‘Eustress’ and is low level stress. Whilst stress can help us it’s important to remember that too much of it can become dangerous for our health and so we should try and reduce the amount of stress we deal with on a daily basis. Knowing the benefits of stress can certainly improve students’ approach to dealing with it.
However, I do think that by and large it’s highly unlikely for students to ever enjoy the unpleasant feeling of stress especially exam stress which is compounded by the consequences of an ever increasing level of competition and the fear of failure.
Alaynah Nawaz - Ursuline Academy Ilford
