Why are American College Students so Stressed? - Facing Invisible Tigers and Surviving the Stress Epidemic

We’re very smart, clever animals. With our intelligence, we’ve created a world with unparalleled amenities like running water, solar panels, electric cars, even pocket-sized supercomputers that give us access to unprecedented information, allow us to explore the solar system, and connect us to nearly every human being at the farthest reaches of our own planet. These are things our ancestors couldn’t have even dreamt of - so why are we so stressed and anxious?  

The simple answer is survival. In many ways, we still respond to our modern stressors as though we’re facing famine, or there is a sabertooth tiger pouncing at us, and we are the main course. For all our modern luxuries, our body processes stressful inputs in much the same way it would have tens of thousands of years ago; the key difference is that we don’t do it acutely for 5 minutes at a time during a tiger attack, we do it chronically over the course of our lifetimes. This is where the danger lies. 

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more than 60 percent of college students said they had experienced “overwhelming anxiety” at some point in the past year

The “parasympathetic” and “sympathetic” nervous systems may not be household concepts, however the symptoms associated with an overactive sympathetic stress response are well known to almost all of us. We’re all familiar with ‘fight or flight’, this is the sympathetic nervous system in action, when we’re in this mode briefly it’s healthy, it helps us survive. When we’re in it chronically, it can have massively damaging effects on our wellbeing. This is the overwhelmed physiological state many college students are finding themselves in on a daily basis. In fact, According to a 2018 report from the American College Health Association, more than 60 percent of college students said they had experienced “overwhelming anxiety” at some point in the past year.

American college students are living in a very interesting time. Most can’t recall a day when they didn’t have ubiquitous access to the internet, and thus, constant flows of bite-sized information, and floods of social media. In nature, our brains are hardwired to be rewarded with a dopamine flush when we discover food, a water source, find a mate, etc., this process creates neural pathways which are beneficial to our survival. In our modern lives, this process is happening at an alarming, unnatural rate with instant gratifications being sought in the digital world, and is proving to have deleterious effects on our brain’s neurochemistry.

This combination of living chronically in the ‘fight or flight’ stress response, and the rewiring of our neural pathways creates a perfect storm for a physiological imbalance that may lead to a myriad of mental and physical problems:

• Loss of sleep, memory and concentration impairment
• Digestive and immune disorders
• Musculoskeletal pain, migraines, etc.
• High blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes
• Depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and more.

Ironically, one of the sneakiest symptoms of an overactive sympathetic nervous system is a marked decrease in one’s ability to cope with, you guessed it, stress. Unsurprisingly, this can lead to a dangerous spiral if left unchecked. Luckily for most, there are very effective coping skills and simple steps that can be taken to change the course of one’s wellness path:

Meditation and Breathing: These could be the single most important tools for mitigating stress. There are many types of meditation and breathing that fit different personality types and situations.
Movement and Diet: Taking care of our physical health and discharging stress through movement is an important and often overlooked aspect of stress management.
Connecting, and disconnecting: Simply keeping a healthy balance between social activity and solitude (including digital detoxing).
Recalibrating: Mindset training is gaining traction as a powerful technique, backed by a significant and fast growing body of research.
Exploring Complimentary Wellness Modalities: Evidence based activities such as acupuncture, yoga, qi gong, etc. are gentle, safe, efficacious ways to mitigate stress and anxiety, help the body release it’s own ‘feel good’ chemicals, and engage the parasympathetic nervous system.

While the epidemic of stress and anxiety on our campuses may feel daunting, there is much that can be done to help students find balance. Many of these techniques are easily integrated into daily routines and feel remarkably natural to most; as it is simply a return to their healthy, harmonious physiological state. After all, we are humans in a modern world coming to terms with modern stressors - and if all goes as planned - not finding ourselves in life or death, fight or flight standoffs with sabertooth tigers. Our student’s stresses are bouts with paper tigers, and while still very real to them, that’s a match they stand a fighting chance of surviving.

If you’d like to learn more about the physiology of stress, I highly recommend you look into the work of Dr. Robert Sapolsky and Dr. Andrew Huberman. Both incredible, highly intellegent researchers in their own right and also remarkably good at distilling their knowledge into a language that’s easy to understand. Here are a few videos to get you started!

"Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: Stress and Health" by Dr. Robert Sapolsky

Science writer, biologist, neuroscientist, and stress expert Dr. Robert Sapolsky presents the inaugural Fenton-Rhodes Lecture on Proactve Wellness. Sapolsky states that our bodies' stress response evolved to help us get out of short-term physical emergencies - if a lion is chasing you, you run. But such reactions, he points out, compromise long-term physical health in favor of immediate self-preservation. Unfortunately, when confronted with purely psychological stressors, such as troubleshooting the fax machine, modern humans turn on the same stress response. "If you turn it on for too long," notes Sapolsky, "you get sick." Sapolsky regards this sobering news with characteristic good humor, finding hope in "our own capacity to prevent some of these problems... in the small steps with which we live our everyday lives." This lecture was recorded on September 22, 2016 at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts' Colwell Playhouse as part of the Pygmalion TechFest

Tools for Managing Stress & Anxiety | Huberman Lab Podcast #10

This episode explains what stress is, and how it recruits our brain and body to react in specific ways. (Dr. Huberman) describes the three main types of stress, and how two of them actually enhance the function of our immune system making us less vulnerable to infections. (He) reviews tools that allow us to control our stress in real-time, as well as tools to prevent long-term stress, burnout and stress-induced illness and anxiety. As always, (he) covers behavioral tools and supplements that can assist or hinder stress control.