As midterms, spring break and summer application deadlines wait just around the corner, students across campus gear up to face the struggle of managing the worries and stresses of concluding a winter season and welcoming spring. Although academic studies are something actually worth stressing over, the modern college student is inundated with an array of anxieties and concerns that upon reflection can seem like a mere waste of energy.
There is no denying that getting a flatter stomach for spring break is a genuine concern racing through most girls’ and even many guys’ minds at this time of year. For some people including myself, the mission of feeling healthy and looking good for the spring season has become a stress that torments our thoughts every single day. Getting to 10,000 steps on my Fitbit every day has somehow managed to become so important to me that at times it genuinely feels like a life-or-death situation. Obviously I know death would not be the immediate consequence of failing to make 10,000 steps every day, but regardless, I still experience such focused anxiety about achieving this health goal that I begin to believe I am not living well if I don’t make enough steps. To my mind, the amount of steps I take every day becomes the judge of my entire quality of living and that is how my brain has irrationally managed to categorize meeting a Fitbit goal as a life-or-death anxiety.
Surely not everyone can relate to this specific example, but the list of similar worries across campus this time of year is endless. Social media anxieties, academic stress, drinking and drug pressures, money concerns and homesickness are only a few more of the many worries that torment the modern student’s mind. Completely ridding ourselves of these underlying “life-or-death” worries is seemingly impossible, but perhaps a change in perspective can offer us all relief from our insane levels of angst.
The New Yorker article “The Prisoner of Stress” explores the ideas in Scott Stossel’s book “My Age of Anxiety” and I think it offers useful insight for all college students on why so many of us suffer from irrational worry. Stossel describes anxiety as “the disease of the modern world,” and I think many of us could agree with this thought. The reason it has become a disease that so many of us suffer from in the first world is because anxiety is a human instinct that warns us of immediate dangers, but the concrete threats of things like animal attacks or freezing to death in winter no longer exist for many of us on the modern college campus. Now that many of the developed countries face less concrete threats, many of us are left with the instinct to worry without rational things to worry about. Thus the modern student loses the ability to create perspective on what is worth feeling life-or-death anxiety over.
Our human instincts have a tendency to worry because some worry is necessary for survival. Speaking about the tendency to worry, “The Prisoner of Stress” says, “It can mean that human beings are creatures who care about the future, and so hoping for good outcomes and worrying about bad ones comes with membership in the species.” The pressure and anxiety to make all the right choices in college, especially in this day and age, catches up to all of us at some point in some way. So in order for students to be both successful and happy, it is important that students make an effort to rationalize their anxieties by changing their perspective and accepting the fact that some crazy stresses are normal. We are only human.
Anna Scott Lovejoy is a freshman majoring in general business and biology. Her column runs biweekly.
