Have you ever felt that school was overly stressful? During midterm week are you cramming incessantly with no time for breaks? Are you spending your time hyperventilating and breaking down in tears?
If your answer is yes to any of the above questions you are suffering from a commonly known syndrome, stress. Schreiber students suffer from stress in excess, and the teachers and administrators should try to do something to curtail it.
Stress can negatively influence your social, physical, and mental abilities; medical journals have shown that stress causes increases in blood pressure, breathing, and heart rate. Often, stress is brought about by accumulated workloads, evaluations, GPAs and college applications.
If your stress levels are increasing due to our schoolwork and causing a deterioration in your grades and health, then doesn’t it seem logical that our school should provide us with stress-relieving programs?
There are many ways in which the administration could provide us with the means to cope with stress. Our school could incorporate an optional yoga class after school to teach breathing exercises and helps relieve stress before students have to go home to study and do more work.
We could also have a similar club designed specifically for resting, in which calming music could be used in order to soothe students’ minds.
Music can also play a large part in influencing a person’s emotions. Even listening to calming music can be relaxing.
Specifically, smooth songs without words, such as classical musical or jazz, can help to lower one’s heart rate, lower blood pressure, and decrease levels of stress-inducing hormones.
In other words, it has the ability to reverse the effects that stress can have on the body.
Furthermore, not only could the school create clubs to serve this purpose, but they could also incorporate it directly into our school schedule as possible electives.
These types of ‘rest and relaxation’ periods could be an option for students who find themselves taking extremely difficult classes with no extra time on their hands to relax at home.
With students who fill up their schedules with many work-intensive classes, the elective could be seen as an active attempt to cope with stress while also lowering their potential workloads.
Many students agree and have suggested similar programs.
“I think that a room, like the commons, could be set aside for relaxation on students’ off periods instead of for eating and socializing,” said junior Stephanie-Anne Thomsen. “That way the program wouldn’t get in the way of other classes.”
However, some argue that these ideas are a little farfetched. They say that most of the ideas cannot be practically implemented into the school schedule.
Although schools recognize that their students are under a great deal of pressure, they also might not want to take responsibility of relieving our stress for us. They might realize that their own efforts may not meet the needs of their students.
“My worry is that people will use these classes or rooms as just another opportunity to socialize instead of using them for what they’re there for,” said junior Cassandra Lammers.
It is a very real concern, and may be a major reason as to why this issue hasn’t been fully addressed.
This, however, doesn’t mean that students should let the stress pile up and get out of hand. There are many little things that students could do on their own time to manage their own stress.
Of course, it could simply be relaxing to do yoga at home. You could also always take five minutes out of your day to meditate.
These actions would serve as a break to keep your mind off of school, or whatever it is that is causing you trouble, and it wouldn’t be very time-consuming. They are great ways for even the most busy students to relax.
With or without the school’s help, you do not need to be hindered by your stress.