Many would pay and work insanely hard to enroll in a better school or take advanced classes. However, we as a society have decided that in our early years, our future success can be determined by our academic achievement. The constant pressure that school may inflict on us, whether from school work, mandatory tests, tutors, parent-teacher conferences, or other’s expectations, could eventually turn into unhealthy stress that drags us down rather than encourages us. This raises the question: What happens to students who are put under a lot of school-related stress?
The student may experience a decline in overall health and well-being. Dealing with stress creates mental, physical, and behavioral problems. For example, anxiety or depression could be developed, headaches and stomachaches are experienced, and the student could become socially withdrawn. This is because many different parts of your brain change due to increased stress. One of the stress-related hormones, cortisol, causes these brain changes when experienced for long periods. Cortisol affects parts of your brain in charge of emotion, decision-making, learning, etc., leading to stress-related health issues. (“How Stress Affects Your Brain” 1:22-2:18) This shows that stress can directly affect health, but how does it affect academics?
A student can eventually lose the motivation to do their school work. When people become overwhelmed, activities become harder to complete. This lack of completion may lead to frustration causing the student to lose motivation to work. For example, a student writing an essay may experience writer’s block or decide to put off the assignment later.
Additionally, school-related stress can affect a student’s academic performance. As mentioned before, stress can affect different functions of your brain. One affected part is the hippocampus, which controls how each person learns. When the amount of cortisol becomes too much for the brain, the signals released in the hippocampus stop functioning, thus affecting your learning. This decline in brain health can be reflected in the person’s academic performance through their struggle to accurately complete assignments, the inability to understand the material, and declining grades.
School carries stress that can lead to many unwanted effects. Although school is the cause of these problems, it’s still essential to have an education. The best we can do is to prevent stress, such as communicating with a student’s teacher about the workload and assignments or managing the student’s time so the work is evenly spread out to reduce the stress of deadlines.
About the Author
Jen, one of our BUBOTS‘ students, is a 14-year-old Freshman based in the US. She enjoys digital art, sketching, playing the piano and flute, singing and ballet. She also loves to experiment in the kitchen. Someday, she’d like to be a certified accountant.