Stress: As midterm season comes and goes, you might have had your fair share of it.
“Stress is something that disturbs what is called homeostasis,” Jonathon Fadok, associate professor of psychology at Tulane University, said. “[Homeostasis] is basically the level at which we would prefer to exist with everything.”
However, stress is not always the bad guy.
“The stress response is actually very beneficial for us, because it helps us prepare for things, and it helps us deal with things that are happening at the moment.”
Stress bell curve:
Stress can be viewed as a bell curve, commonly known as the Yerkes-Dodson law. The curve’s x-axis ranges from low to high levels of arousal, and its y-axis ranges from low to high performance.
“If you are too low on the stress bell, you’re kind of unmotivated. You might not care to study for the exam,” Fadok said. “You need a good level of stress in order to motivate you and help you study for the exam … [That] ideal level of stress actually enhances brain function.”
Stress is most beneficial in limited amounts. A little anxiety before an exam might convince you to study, but being too nervous during the test can cause you to lose focus.
“In the terms of [an] exam day, you mount a stress response because you’re like, ‘I really want to do well on this,’ and it actually will enhance your brain performance,” Fadok said. “But then once you go to the other side of the stress bell, then it becomes damaging.”
Stress load:
Ultimately, prolonged stress, or chronic stress, can be detrimental to health.
“If you keep mounting a large stress response … your body can’t fully recover from the previous one, and so you get what’s called ‘a stress load’ that builds up.”
A study shows that chronic stress can mimic the effects of depressive disorders on the brain structure and can make you more susceptible to mental health issues. As the brain works overtime to maintain a constant state of alertness, the neuroimmune system becomes overstimulated and can break down over time.
“It changes the way our immune system works. It causes inflammation in the body and the brain. It changes the way the brain works, essentially,” Fadok said. “One exam isn’t going do it, but chronic stress for a long time [will].”
Stress coping:
While a constant list of to-dos seems overwhelming, minimizing stress daily can help prevent a build-up.
“The best thing that you can do is just learn stress coping techniques,” Fadok said. “When you learn and start to understand how the body responds to stress, then you can learn different strategies to help mitigate that response.”
Unfortunately, stress is an unavoidable experience.
“Stress doesn’t go away … anxiety doesn’t go away. It’s just a matter of everybody learning the things that help them cope with it,” Fadok said.
Study techniques, for example, can help prevent stress from piling up too high. Invented by a university student, the Pomodoro Technique splits work into short time intervals separated by a few minutes of break.
“I encourage my students to use that because not only will it lessen the stress response, but it’s actually how the brain best learns,” Fadok said. “When we form memories, including memories of stuff we’re supposed to know for exams … we retrieve that information from our memory banks … Each time we do that, [memory] can be strengthened. You make those memories stronger, which is why, the more times you study something and if you space it out, the easier it is to bring it back out.”
While hibernating for the weekend sounds tempting after a week of exams, exercise and breathing techniques can also help bring your body back to equilibrium.
“Relaxation will be very different for different people,” Fadok said. “Try to use techniques that don’t allow us to get too stressed over it, and then in the ideal situation, to carve out time after the stress event to let our bodies relax.”
