It’s getting that time in the semester where a lot of college students face an insurmountable amount of stress. Exams coming back lower than we anticipated, many assignments due, and just overall college is getting everyone stressed out. This is something that I personally am suffering with these blogs, much like some of you. I didn’t do well on blog period 1, and now I’m stressed at every sentence in my blogs to make sure they’re good enough for a good grade. The question I keep asking myself is, is this stress making me worse off?
Is stress making us worse off? Source
Looking at this from a scientific perspective, we have either the null hypothesis (stress is not affecting our health or over-all well being), or the alternate hypothesis (stress is indeed affecting our health or over-all well being). Reverse casuation is also something that could be possible here, as I know our grades or health may affect our stress levels, but in this blog we’re specifically looking if being stressed out will further advance the downward spiral that started when you got stressed, and how it affects things like our eating, sleeping, or exercise patterns.
Now, here is a quick video about how stress may affect our body:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-t1Z5-oPtU
Background: After a good bit of searching on the topic, I came across this study done in 2006 in the New York area that tested how stress affected mood, self-esteem, and a person’s daily habits. Before I get into what the study was and what it found, I want to share some earlier this article shared and what those studies found before they explained their findings. First off, women in college are more likely to experience more amounts of stress than men, according to these studies the journal mentioned (Mallinckrodt, Leong, & Kralj, 1989; Cahir & Morris, 1991; Toews, Lockyer, Dobson, & Brownell, 1993; Nelson, Dell’Oliver, Koch, & Buckler, 2001). Likewise, those who worked a lot of hours outside of their studies experienced a massive stress increase over those who didn’t work said hours. This is related to the same names and studies listed above. Likewise, it should be noted that these studies were based on of doctorate programs, which entails higher levels of work, and therefore higher levels of stress than us in the undergraduate level.
Stress causes more irritability, nervousness, impulsiveness, emotional instability, among other things according to the study listed above. Source
The Procedure: So these studies showed what kinds of emotions people were experiencing due to stress and the likelihood of getting stressed, but they never went far enough to see how this affected people’s lives. This is where the New York study comes in. In this study, the participants were 65 graduate students. Of those 65, 49 were female and 16 were men, with the age ranging from 22-49. Using a questionnaire, the researchers asked the participants to first assess their stress using the Student Stress Scale created by Insel & Roth in 1991. In this study, stress was assessed by a number between 1-100 (minor stressful events get a lower score, more stressful events lead to a higher score). The participants looked at the 31 potential events that the Student Stress Scale measured, and wrote down the events that happened to them recently.
Then, the participants went through more questions asking about their daily habits, from a 1-5 scale (1 being not at all, 5 being daily). Questions like alcohol/tobacco use, eating patterns, and proper sleep was analyzed through these questions. High scores meant that there was a big shift from the normal, and low scores meant a little/no shift from the normal. Likewise, mood was also tested with the same 1-5 scale, being asked how often they were in positive moods in the last month. This was based on 20 variables The higher the score in mood, the better the person’s mood was. Finally, students were asked to base their self-esteem on the SD-SA scale (SD meaning strongly disagree, SA meaning strongly agree) after being asked multiple questions about their self-esteem. The higher the score on this, the better the self-esteem.
Results: Before saying the results of the study, it should be mentioned that the participants filled out the questionnaire at home, then mailed them anonymously to the researchers so the researchers would be blind to who wrote what questionnaire. So, although this wasn’t an observational or experimental study, it was a blind one. Therefore, things like independent/dependent variables were not put in place and measured. As we know from class, observational and experimental studies are far more likely to actually find the answer to the hypothesis than just asking them, as personal bias’ may make it hard for them to be truthful. Therefore, you may want to take the results of this study with a grain of salt.
Likewise, I’m not going to include the data of the study on the blog, but feel free to look at the data on this journal. According to the results, interestingly enough, the graduate students mostly experienced low stress and were somewhat satisfied in themselves. Changes in eating habits, positive moods, and both smoking and alcohol habits were not related to higher levels of stress. However, both sleeping, negative moods, and exercise was greatly related to stress. That means that these graduate students felt more stressed with more exercise (!!!) and less sleep, along with negative mood. Surprisingly, however, eating habits, drinking/smoking, and positive moods were not affected by the stress.
So, the study does indeed conclude the alternate hypothesis-stress does indeed affect our health and well-being, albeit less than one might originally have thought. This is due to it not affecting positive moods, eating habits, or drinking/smoking as one would think it would. However, some possible other explanations for these results could be geographical (only choosing students from New York), the oversampling of women over men, and the fact that the study was neither an experimental or observational. Therefore, the alternate hypothesis was the conclusion of this study, but be wary of a false positive that more studies might find. So next time you’re feeling stressed out, maybe try to meditate, breathe, or take your workload one thing at a time, before you let it affect your well-being. And always remember, stress is a temporary thing and, although we all feel it right now, it will get better soon.
Good work with your post. I also did not do as well as anticipated on the first blog period, so I too am working on trying to make every sentence the best it can be. The best way I have learned to deal with all of the rigors of college life is to have set goals for every day and then budget my time in order to accomplish them. Sometimes it means working long and late hours but you have to put in the time in order to succeed. While I agree with the conclusion that stress affects our wellbeing but I was unaware it was to such a small extent. It’s funny that students felt more stressed with more exercise. Personally, whenever I can get to the gym or out for a run, it instantly clears my head and I feel like it reduces my stress level. Maybe that is just how I am, but I’m sure that there are others in the world who feel the same way. This study could be improved, however. With a larger sample size, you would be more easily able to rule out chance. with a small study of 65 students, the sample size isn’t large enough to get a decisive grasp on the true data. I would also balance the amount of men and women in the study because it is a possibility that one sex may be more stressed on average than the other. Give that link a read and see if you agree that balancing the amount of men and women in the study could affect the results.
I can completely relate to this topic, and I think you did a very good job with your blog post! Something that I have noticed that has really helped me maintain my unavoidable stress is keeping a planner. I am able to organize my day and visualize what needs to be done. Also, when I think about what needs to be done for the day I find myself scrambling, but when I write it down I realize that I don’t need to do as much as I had originally thought. It is extremely satisfying to make a big line through the task once it is completed. When I see that I have a busy week coming up I start my work earlier, and I use my planner to keep track of my progress. I don’t only use it for school work, but I also write in when I want to go to the gym, if I have a club meeting, or even if there is a football game. With all of the information of what is going to happen or what needs to happen right in front of me I am able to clearly see when I will have free-time. A website that assists those struggling mentally confirms my belief that planning out your week for both work and personal events will help relieve stress.
https://www.mentalhelp.net/articles/time-management-to-prevent-stress/
Thanks for the helpful info Taylor! I added a snippet at the end of how to deal with stress, fixed some grammatical errors, and added a little more of class discussion in it! Hopefully it’s a better blog now.
This is a topic that is really relevant for college and myself considering so many students have many different things going on and could lead to overwhelming sense of the monster of STRESS!. I like how in the closing part of the blog you talked about and wrapped it all the way back around to the alternative hypothesis that stress does in fact effect our health. Do you think the topic of stress can lead to chance? I would have liked to see more information from class talked about in post. However, I did like how you broke down the post and put procedures and results and I would have liked for you too have talked about some methods of how to relieve the stress. Thats the problem in college at least for me I just don’t know how to relieve the stress once I have it. Here are some healthy ways to relive stress stated in the article . Top 10 ways to reduce or relieve stress: mediate, deep breaths,( for example before an exam), ask for help. Thats the biggest one I feel people don’t like to do. if your stressed tell someone as for help don’t be afraid. There is many emotions to show when you feel stressed so it was interesting reading this post and reading the different emotions.
http://www.webmd.com/balance/guide/blissing-out-10-relaxation-techniques-reduce-stress-spot (read more of the article to help find more ways)