Handling Stress: Part 1
What is stress?
Stress is what you feel when you react to pressure from others or from yourself. Pressure can come from anywhere, including school, work, activities, friends, and family members. You can also feel stress from the pressure of wanting to get good grades or wanting to feel like you belong. Stress comes in many forms and everyone feels stress.
How does my body handle stress?
Your body has a built-in response to handle stress. When something stressful happens, you may experience sweaty palms, dry mouth, or knots in your stomach. This is totally normal and means that your body is working exactly as it should. Other signs of stress include emotional signals such as feeling sad or worried, behavioral signs such as not feeling up to doing things, and mental signs such as not being able to concentrate or focus.
What causes stress?
Just being a young adult can be stressfulthere is so much going on and so many changes that are happening all at once!
Some Things That Might Cause Stress
- School or work
- Not feeling good about yourself
- Changes in your body or weight
- Body shape or size
- Problems with friends, boyfriends or girlfriends, or other students on campus
- Living in a dangerous neighborhood
- Peer pressure from friends to dress or act a certain way or smoke, drink, or use drugs
- Not fitting in or being part of a group
- Moving or friends moving away
- Separation or divorce of parents
- A family member who is ill
- Death of a loved one
- Changing schools
- Taking on too many activities at once
- Not getting along with your parents or having problems with your family
- Feeling lonely
There may be other things that cause stress for you that are not on this list. Also, it can be very tough when more than one stressful event happens at the same time or stress is ongoing.
Is stress always a bad thing?
No! A little bit of stress can work in a positive way. For instance, during a sports competition, stress might push you to perform better. Also, without the stress of deadlines, you might not be able to finish class assignments or get to where you need to be on time.
GirlsHealth, National Women's Health Information Center. (Updated 2007, April). Mind emotion commotion: Handling stress. Retrieved June 10, 2013, from http://www.girlshealth.gov/