Home » Arts & Life » Under pressure

Under pressure

Illustration by Anders Kravis/Gazette

It’s exam season, and you have three finals in four days. You haven’t made it to the gym in weeks and that bag of chips is starting to haunt you. At home you grab some dinner and try to memorize a theory that’s sure to be on your exam tomorrow — which is difficult since your BlackBerry won’t stop buzzing.

With exams and daily chores stressing you out, how are you possibly going to remember anything?

“Stress is a normal part of existence on planet Earth. Chronic stress usually refers to the stress that lasts probably longer than a semester, but most of the stress that kids at university are experiencing have breaks in [their stress],” says Elizabeth Osuch, a psychiatrist at London Health Sciences Centre.

“Some people put themselves under chronic stress because they have very high expectations of themselves.”

It’s not always stress itself that causes people problems — it’s how they handle it.

Adam Mutsaers, a second-year Ivey student, knows his personality plays a role in his stress level.

“It’s the pressure of getting things done well on time. Because they can get done, but I’m a bit of a perfectionist,” he says. “It stresses me out not just thinking about the deadlines but on how to go over and above and achieve success.”

Side Effects

Stress is not something that we only deal with on a psychological level — there are physical side effects as well.

“I used to have panic attacks in first-year before I learned how to deal with managing the exam stress,” says Victoria Rodrigues, a fourth-year criminology student. “You feel overwhelmed and you start breathing really heavily and it feels like you’re having a heart attack.”

Although personality does play a part, the brain has a larger role because it functions as a threat detector and activates our stress response.

During acute stress, the hypothalamus tells the adrenal glands to crank out corticosteroid hormones, which have very specific effects.

Osuch notes one of the things it tends to do is put people in the fight-or-flight mode, so their bodies are more prepared for action. They’re less likely to sleep or eat, and their sex drive goes down. All of the vegetative processes tend to decrease and all the fight-flight processes increase.

Sarah Lynde, a first-year social science student, says she experiences headaches and extreme fatigue.

“The physical feeling for me is heaviness. It’s hard to explain, but I find that when I think of everything I need to do, there’s just all this stuff on me,” she says as her hands fly to her forehead, clearly uncomfortable at the thought. “I often can’t sleep because I’m thinking of everything I have to do.”

Performance

Although stress can be an uncomfortable feeling, it does have benefits. Osuch notes a little bit of stress can actually enhance performance. The “inverted U response” shows that as stress levels increase, so does performance — up to a person’s optimal level of stress.

Osuch explains a little stress can increase a person’s ability to memorize, concentrate and perform motor tasks.

“If you push the stress and anxiety a little bit further you actually start to get impaired performance.[…] Too much will paralyze the person and they won’t be able to function. There is an optimal level of anxiety for each individual that maximizes their performance.”

Many Western students are aware that stress can help their academic performance, and without it they probably wouldn’t get much done. But too much stress is debilitating.

“With a little bit of stress I push myself harder. If I’m not stressed out about something, I basically do the minimum work,” Lynde says. “But if I’m really stressed out, I have a hard time retaining things.”

Memory

You’ve likely experienced a scenario like this before: You’re running late for an exam, and in the midst of grabbing pens and eating cereal, you realize you have no idea where your bus pass is. When you finally make it to your exam, you’re able to much more complex information than where you put your bus pass.

So what is it that makes a person blank out on some things, but perform brilliantly on others when feeling stressed?

Albert Katz, a professor of psychology at Western, says different aspects of memory are involved.

He says forgetting the location of a bus pass could be due to inattention. But on an exam, the brain uses cues in the questions to recall the right information.

Mutsaers says during exam time, anything not concerning studying does not take priority.

“I had a friend today ask me to watch their coat and I just totally forgot. I get one-track-minded about my schedule and the things I have to do, and if something interrupts that it stresses me out further, and in some ways I guess my brain just ignores it,” he says.

The problem is that when you focus all of your attention on one thing it can impair retrieval cues for other things.

“For many memory tasks we need retrieval cues — a way to find the information that we have stored. Narrowing of attention may lead us to miss the important retrieval routes. It is not that the information is not available; we just are not accessing it,” Katz explains.

“It’s as if the book is in the library but we can’t find the call numbers to go the right place in the library stacks.”

Coping mechanisms:

Since a little stress can be a good thing, but too much is debilitating, perhaps the biggest struggle is determining how you should cope with it.

Osuch suggests carving out a period of time each day to do something for yourself. “You don’t need a huge break, you just need little breaks regularly to offload some of that pressure,” she says.

Some students, like Lynde, take little breaks between studying or start the day off by going to the gym.

Rodrigues says organization helps her deal with stress, which is why she likes to set up a specific schedule with what she needs to do each day.

Even though student life is stressful, especially during exam time, anxiety is something we need to learn how to handle.

“When you start to see problems is when people who are so hard driven that the only way they can relax is by using some kind of intoxicating substance, and then you know that there are some problems there,” Osuch says.

“If you really like turning on that kind of pressure, that’s fine. But you should be able to turn it off so it’s not controlling your life.”

Follow the Gazette on Facebook and Twitter.