Stressing about stress: Strategies render widespread stressors more manageable

Students—especially those in high school—know that academic work can be overwhelming, difficult to understand and downright stressful. Freshman Catherine Liu is no different, juggling multiple extracurricular activities with schoolwork. Liu’s stress comes mainly from homework, studying and afterschool dance classes, along with pressure from her parents to get good grades. In terms of schoolwork,...

Managing many different classes and extracurricular activities can be stressful, especially when deadlines overlap. With multiple activities and classes, sophomore Connor Engstrom acknowledges that juggling all of them can be difficult to manage. For Engstrom, stress comes from a variety of sources. “The factors that cause stress are schoolwork, extracurricular activities and pressure from my parents...

Junior year is notorious for elevated stress levels—a challenge that junior Rohan Kancherla faces. Kancherla, however, views stress as a driving force. “Stress can be really motivating, [because] it makes you feel an urgency and need to try,” he said. Stress can often stem from societal pressures, especially in an environment that prioritizes a rigorous, academic lifestyle. Kancherla attributes...

Senior Arezoo Ghasemzadeh wakes up at 6 a.m. two school days a week to attend her 6:30 a.m. weightlifting class—just one of her outlets in dealing with stress. “The pressure of earning good grades, getting into a good college and meeting my parents’ expectations contributes to my stress,” she said. One common phrase that Ghasemzadeh tells herself when she is stressed is that “everything...