Causes of Stress and Solutions for Them

Stress is a chronic problem for university students. There are many types of stress that university students meet. Too much stress can lead to serious problems which will harm university students’ physical and mental health if students cannot find correct solutions to help them reduce the negative impact from stress. More than that, chronic stress even can change in people’s bodies or causes other bad habits that people always use to cope with stress (American Psychological Association, 2013). Accordingly, learning how to deal with these problems is particularly significant. This essay will discuss two common causes of stress that university students experience and their solutions.

Poor self-management causes many problems for university students. Self-management mainly consists of time-management, health-management and financial management. For example, financial stress is a kind of common stress for university students who cannot do well in self-management. The spending of students mainly includes living consumption and tuition fees. It argued that university tuition fees had increased more than the average increase of household income (2015). It means university students will deal with more financial stress. Causes of financial stress can be analysed in two parts, family’s economic situation and financial management. Family’s economic support is the foundation of university students’ finance. However, the severity of financial stress to a great extent depends on financial management. Some students spend too much money on luxury goods or computer games to satisfy their vanity. It means they must reduce the outcome on living consumption, which may affect their body health. Similarly, poor health-management and poor time-management could engender adverse consequences. Here are some solutions to help university students reduce the negative impact from poor self-management. Firstly, try to learn about self-management deeply as soon as possible. Secondly, a good “tutor” can help students a lot .Such as their teachers or friends who can give them many constructive suggestions. Finally, students who are under pressure should make a clear plan about how to improve their self-management and the most important thing is practice.

“Confusion” is another common cause of university students’ stress. The word “confusion” depends on different time. A research (Crandall, 2011 cited in Reifman, 2011) showed that students in year 1 and year 4 reported more stress than in other years. Two different types of “confusion” cause these stressors. The first one is from strange environment for university students in year 1. These students come to universities with “confusion” for the future. They generally do not know their own clear goals and how to adjust to university life quickly. Adjusting requires a process for every freshman. But different people require different time in this process when “confusion” surrounds them. The second type of “confusion” is from competition of employment for university students in year 4. The research (Crandall, 2011 cited in Reifman, 2011) indicated over 76% of students said they were under pressure of finding employment when they graduated. These days, an increasing number of students graduate from universities with “confusion” of their career which causes much stress. There are some solutions about this problem. Firstly, no matter year 1 students or year 4 students, they all need to learn more about their career development through various channels and set clear goals for themselves. Secondly, be more optimistic about “confusion”. An article  showed that the energy from stress should be used in a positive way (Davis-Laack, 2015). McGonigal argued that it is less harmful for people who do not realize the negative impact of stress than those who do (How to Make Stress your Friend, 2013). It is clear that students surrounded by some ”confusion” are supposed to consider it in a positive way.