Academic stress negatively affects students’ well-being
Teachers and parents are noticing students having mental and physical problems due to school.
Students feel they are forced to push their anxiety away and put on a fake face in order to not fall behind in school
June 30, 2023
After waking up at around 6 a.m., Gabrielle Tahaney, or Gabby as her friends call her, has much to do. She has to get through a seven-hour school day, followed by her extracurricular activities. Gabby plays on the school’s volleyball team, having practice end at 5:30, sometimes 6 pm. After that, she goes to dance until about 8-8:30 at night. She then gets home, eats dinner, takes a shower, and attempts to take care of herself.
It is usually around 9:30 pm. when she is able to start her homework and studying, leaving her with only a few hours of sleep, before starting this process all over again. Many students like Gabby go through this vicious cycle of trying to keep up with everything that they have going on in their lives, often forgetting about their mental and physical health.
Students every year experience a lot of stress from school. Many of them end up having mental and/or physical health issues because of this which causes them to get sick, feel overwhelmed, and overall not perform to the best of their abilities. Stress affects teens’ overall health and well-being.
Guidance counselor Julie Blake believes that students can get stressed easily because schools don’t talk about the multiple failures that can happen throughout the students’ lives, and that it’s okay to experience them. “When you are going through and building for success, I think students don’t understand that there will be multiple small failures along the road,” she said.
Mrs. Blake also stated that students who learn early in life that failures will happen, end up doing better when they are older. This allows them to take a failure, better than a student who hasn’t experienced one. Students often feel that if they fail at something, it makes it harder to want to continue the day. They often feel down about themselves and don’t know what to do.
Elisa Chin, a junior at Hunterdon Central, believes that when getting a bad grade on something, it can ruin a student’s day, making them overthink the whole grade. “All these thoughts will come into my head about ‘this is gonna affect this, and this is gonna affect my future, and I won’t be able to do this,’ and it’s just a long thought process,” she said.
Oftentimes, students get very stressed about their grades. Whether they got a D- on a big project or failed an exam, it is hard to break out of the cycle of feeling down about it. But there are some ways to help you cope with a bad grade.