Every college student in the world deals with stress. Our reasons for it, levels of it, and control of it vary, but we can't deny that we all experience it. This post is targeting what happens to those who experience sever stress and how to deal with it. The bottome line is, most of the stress typically comes from classes, or academic related issues. Maybew its a combination of how academics collide with something else like your job or your social life, but either way, academics are related. Stress can cause serious health issues, and not to mention put a halt to an individuals pursuit of happiness, and for those who have too much in their lives, simply ease up a little on yourself.

Stress can cause serious health problems. Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist at Stanford, states that natural stress is the anxiety of running for your life, or any similar situation. The stress most people experience is put on them by themselves, and is alot worse than the "natural stress" because we usually experience it for a prolonged time period. Constantly being stressed can lead to adult diabetes, or high blood-pressure. Also, usually people either eat more or less when chronically stressed, and this messes with your metabolism. There have been cases where children have been so stressed that their growth has been "markedly impaired". These all might not affect you currently, but you could be starting them now and not even know it.

Also, if you focus on your future too much (which I think is the main cause of stress now), you will all but kill any chance of achieving flow or happiness. This might help if your classes are something you love, but I don't think just classes can make you happy, regardless of how much you love them. In an article about stress in music students lives, it says one of their main hinderances to being happy is that they are usually alone when practicing. This pretty much knocks out the relationship part of their life for alot of the time. This applies to anyone who spends alot of time alone doing classwork. Most people at this school are very motivated, but sometimes I get the feeling that people think now they just need to work and party, work and party, which to them may be happiness, but it seems like they view all the work now as paying their dues so in the future they will have a more Shumakeristic or real happiness. This is true to an extent, I mean there's alot of stuff you can't do unless you work hard at it, but you have to enjoy yourself too.

Relationships can also be affected by stress. Stress causes people to be angry alot of the time, and tense. If your in your room doing work all the time worrying about everything you have going on, it will tend to anger you. Then if one of your friends says something to you that would normally just annoy you a little bit, you might get mad at them and let out all the tension and worry about other stuff on them. This can damage relationships, and relationships are vital to happiness. Would you want to ruin a friendship rather than take a little more time for yourself and get an A rather than an A+? In Dr. Saoplsky's study, he found that states in the U.S with higher life expectancy rates are those with a more social based society. Utah for example, is hugher lergely due to the close friendships alot of people there get from the Mormon Church.

After reading all this alot of you might still think, "O well I still want to be rich later in life so I need to work now". This not only keeps the stress on you, but It doesn't in any way reflect the concept of flow we've been studying. Stress will always be there, but you can reduce it by choosing a career that you love, which will in turn give you the best chance of flow while at work. This might also be more stress to you if it is in a competitive industry. Eating normally, excercising physically (which is scientifically proven to make you happier), and taking a break every once in a while all help to relieve stress.