Title: HOW TO HELP TEENS MANAGE ACADEMIC STRESS
Author: Middleearthnj
Date of publication: September 13,2021.
Paragraph #1: School after a pandemic year and stress for grades have arrived.
Paragraph #2:
- 75% of teens report that school is a significant source of stress.
- Stress can negatively impact health.
Tips for ways to deal with stress
Paragraph #3:
- Acknowledge the stress: Stress is real and feeling understood can reduce stress.
Paragraph #4:
- Emphasize good health: Taking care of your body can improve mental health, some of the things you can do are: sleeping 8–9 hours, exercising, and eating well.
Paragraph #5:
- Discuss healthy coping skills: There are positive ways to relieve stress, such as spending time outside, doing yoga, making time for a fun activity, listening to music, or playing with a pet.
Paragraph #6:
- Offer perspective: People with High GPA do not mean that they will be successful in life.
Paragraph #7:
- Teach prioritization: Teens should develop a schedule to create a balance.
Paragraph #8:
- Reframe negative thoughts: Negative self-talk can improve stress. But we have to remind them of times they worked hard and improved.
Paragraph #9:
- Act as a cheerleader: Motivate teens, this can help them reduce stress and have a better performance at school.
Essay: Academic stress in teenagers
Each person has felt stress at some point. According to Oxford Languages, stress is the mind’s reaction to any change that requires an adjustment or response. Sometimes, it could be harmful if people don’t know how to handle it. Specifically for teenagers, the stress and hustle of school can affect them negatively. Some of the things that most teens stress over is their schoolwork. This stress can be prevented by measures like studying with anticipation. If these measures are not taken, it can cause stress, anxiety, depression, decreased sleep quality, anger issues, and bad academic performance. This can even cause kids to burn out by the time they get to college, or to feel the psychological and physical effects of stress for much of their adult lives. This article shows many ways to decrease stress or help others to control their stress.
Teens with high levels of stress during the school year are more likely to have trouble sleeping. Sleep is essential for everyone, especially for teens, because it’s the body’s time to repair the damage to the day, regulate hormones, consolidate memory, and others. Every teenager needs eight to nine hours of sleep. Poor sleep makes stress management more difficult, negatively impacting concentration, learning, listening, memory, and problem-solving. This leads to bad performance at school and sometimes can unleash cardiovascular diseases, and high blood pressure, which alters a teenager’s ability to function in other activities. For this reason, it is very important to emphasize the importance of good sleep for better health.
An effective way to relieve stress is by discussing healthy coping skills. Coping skills are methods that people use to deal with stressful situations (NCI Dictionary). These activities include listening to music, having a hobby, talking with friends, or playing with a pet; these activities can help teens to relax and feel less overwhelmed with schoolwork. By teaching them good habits like developing a schedule to organize all their activities, they can create a balance in their life between academic and extracurricular activities. Also, these activities can distract teens and make them focus on their duties, and not overthink them.
In stressful situations, the adolescent only focuses on the amount of work, and the pressure, and not on actually learning. When they lose control of handling stress and schoolwork, they feel overwhelmed and frustrated. For this reason, we should offer perspective and reframe negative thoughts. People with higher GPA’s in high school do not mean that they will be successful in life. GPA doesn’t determine how hard people will work to chase their dreams. On the other hand, negative self-talk can improve stress. But they need to think about the times they worked hard and succeeded.
It is important to control stress levels at all ages, not only teenagers. But in this stage, human beings are very vulnerable. Parents must act as cheerleaders. Motivating teens can help them to have better performance at school and increase their self-esteem. Providing a healthy stress-free environment for adolescents to develop a healthy learning process.
References:
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress
Questions:
- Why do teens have more stress than adults if their lives are supposed to be easier?
- Why are grades so important if they don’t determine someone’s success?
- Can mental illness increase because of stress?
- Can illness caused by stress be a cause of early death?
- Overthinking can cause burnout?