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.

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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.