Stressed Out Video

Stressed Out!

Stress Tolerance: New Challenges for Millennial College Students

College is stressful right? It’s arguably one of the most stressful times in a person’s life. Exams, figuring out what to do with your life, finding true love, becoming independent, dealing with finances, and new social spheres are just a few of the major stressors that college aged Millennials deal with. How do students tackle life with the entire world on their shoulders? Which coping techniques are most advantageous and which are in fact detrimental?

Researchers at Georgia Southern University, in association with MIT, created a study aimed to answer these questions. The project entailed 260 randomly selected students taking a Healthful Living class, most

of whom were freshmen, to identify levels of stress tolerance and the coping strategies that college-age students utilize. The results? Apparently, Millennials aren’t very good at coping with stress. It was found that many of the most commonly utilized mechanisms either had negative impacts on stress coping capabilities, or no substantial effect at all.

 

Results: If you answered A to any of the above questions, you answered the same way as the students with high stress tolerance. Way to go! You're practically adulting! If you answered B to any of these questions, these were answers that correlated with neither a helpful or detrimental stress factor. If you answered C to any of these questions you might want to rethink your habits! These answers were similar to the answers of participants with low stress tolerance scores.  

 

According to this study, “stress tolerance has thus been defined as the ability of an individual to handle stressors without succumbing to their effects.” So when you bomb your test and binge eat on food, hoping to die, you aren’t coping with the problem but are actually succumbing to the stress and letting it overwhelm you. In fact, those with low stress tolerance have an increased risk of becoming discouraged and dropping out of college.

 

In conclusion, popular coping mechanisms, such as surfing the web, are related to low stress tolerance, thus, making life harder for Millennials. The results of this study were significant, though more research would help to clearly identify factors and various coping mechanisms in larger sample sizes. If these stress coping mechanisms are acknowledged and students become better educated on this topic, life, though perhaps no easier, will definitely be more manageable for the millions of Millennial coming of age.

____________________________________________________________

Works Cited:

BLAND, H. W., MELTON, B. F., WELLE, P., & BIGHAM, L. (2012). STRESS TOLERANCE: NEW CHALLENGES FOR MILLENNIAL COLLEGE STUDENTS. College Student Journal, 46(2), 362-375.

Pokemon Go

Pokémon is a game/world created by a Japanese business. It deals with made up creatures that players, called trainers, catch, train and fight. It can be played in various mediums and even has a cartoon TV. show. Recently, the company created a new way of looking into the Pokémon realm that allows users to interact not only with the Pokémon world but also with our own. It created quite a stir and became viral. The game became so big, so fast because it effectively drew players in through identification and use of growing “world browsing” technology and accomplished its goal of getting kids to be more active.

The game uses a technology that has been slowly gaining popularity, that of a “world browser”.  A smart phone can use the camera to display on the screen and on top of that use location programing that can superimpose any text, info, or picture on the screen creating a feeling that the experience is somehow real, like looking through a magical glass to a new world that has always been there. To John Tinnell this technology allows “any place—not just government sanctioned ones—[to] become digitally saturated with media content to the extent that it may function as a proportionate replica, historical reenactment, or monument…” or in the case of Pokémon Go, a new world full of made up creatures. It permits people to interact with the environment and creates a unique mixture of the literal and virtual that makes it a novel game to play.

People use the app to find Pokémon creatures to train by walking around their neighborhoods. As players walk so do the avatars on the screen further allowing users to feel like they are a part of the game world. As a reverse affect, we bring those avatars characters into the real world. And this is in part of how the game becomes so big, so fast. As people progress further through the Pokémon realm, they took that identity as a Pokémon trainer and desired to share success with ‘real world’ friends, who caught on and began to play as well.

When starting, players create an avatar of themselves, being able to pick what their character looks like which allows players to identify with their avatar drawing players in. For example, though the purple hair is a different touch, when creating my avatar, I chose similar traits such as white, female, and blue eyes, just like me. The characters are comic like, relatively simple and can look like yourself, or a cooler version. As Scott McCloud explains in Understanding Comics the simplicity of characters in comics allows us to identify with the characters and thus draws one into the comic. Pokémon Go uses the simple features to draw players into the game; you literally become a Pokémon trainer.

New technology allows new possibilities to our world and Pokémon Go is an exceedingly fun game that will persuade any couch potato to go Catch ‘Em All.
To read more about augmented reality app/games check out my classmates' blogs Ammon Hooper and Amy Cox