What you Need to Know About Stress Culture and how to Overcome it

If you are a former or current college student, it’s likely that you have some experience with stress culture. Stress culture is the product of a misguided belief that stress is a testimony to hard work and effort, not the result of a difficult or intense situation.

This misunderstanding views stress not as something negative, but as something positive. It infers that without stress a person is not working hard enough. But, this is a complete false representation of what stress truly is.

Stress, according to the Oxford Dictionary is “a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or demanding circumstances.” So why then do so many people associate stress with something positive, such as hard work or being a good student.

One answer can be that stress commonly arises from situations that require hard work. For example if you have an exam coming up and the score on that exam counts for 25% of your final grade, that is stressful. Or, if you have a ten-page paper due in an hour and you only started writing that paper 20 minutes ago, that is also stressful.

But, stress culture is something different. Stress culture enforces the false belief that stress is a requirement of good students. Stress culture says that you are not a good student unless you are stressed. Newsflash! This is false.

If you are a student, it’s not uncommon to find yourself in a stressful situation. College is demanding: subjects can be difficult to master and spending too much time procrastinating could result in you having to complete an important assignment in a short amount of time. But, you shouldn’t have to be stressed to prove that you are making an effort. You can be working hard and not be stressed. This shouldn’t be a revolutionary idea, but sadly, for many people, it is.

I will admit, I too have fallen under the spell of stress culture. The first time I pulled an all-nighter, I actually felt like it was some sort of right of passage for becoming a hard working student. I thought about my friends who regularly told me things like …

“I stayed in the library until 4 a.m.”

“I get at most 3 hours of sleep a night.”

“I could have done better, I only got a B.”

Hearing my friends say things like this over and over and over again made me second guess every time I considered to stop studying before midnight, or wanted to take the time to shower instead of reading the last 50 pages of that night’s reading assignment. I felt like I wasn’t working hard enough, when in reality I was expecting far too much of myself.

When I finally realized that stress was not something I was required to experience, I started prioritizing my mental and physical health over achieving academic perfection. Even if I had a lot of work, I started making time to do things that made me feel happy and healthy such as going to yoga, taking a walk and eating lunch with friends. By changing my mindset, I started to enjoy the process of learning instead of feeling anxious about it.

Newly free from stress culture’s mental restraints, I was eager to help my friends also discover this type of mental freedom. So, I coaxed my friends out of the library to go on walks and begged them to take a breaks from studying to go grab lunch. Most of my friends appreciated being forced to take a break, but without their willingness to accept that stress isn’t necessary, there was only so much I could do.

The first step to ending stress culture is to accept that you might be part of the reason it exists. In my opinion the biggest influencers of stress culture are actually the people who are falling victim to its unreasonable expectations. By complaining about your B or priding yourself in studying for ten hours straight, you are only adding to the power stress culture has over you. Students need to stop pressuring each other and themselves to exceed unattainable standards. We all need sleep, we all need time to relax and we should all make time to shower. If we want to stop stress culture we need to start prioritizing our mental and physical health over academic perfection. So, the next time your friend tells you she skipped lunch because she was studying for a test, don’t act impressed, voice your concern. Stress isn’t a requirement, so let’s stop treating it like one.