Facing Stress is very common in school especially near exam time or due dates of assignments. Learning ways to cope with stress can minimize the negative impact stress has on your mental health leading to maximize academic performance. Here are 5 ways that I come up while in school that I think might be helpful to new college students.

1. Have a support network - They are the academic resource center, the professors or teaching assistance, your friends, your family or school counselors. By having a reliable network of support, you allow yourself to reach out to people who can help you. Furthermore, it makes you feel less isolated and helpless knowing that there is something you can do about your problems. So for instance, if you fail an exam and you don’t know how to ace the next one, you can talk to your teaching assistance or professors for studying advice. You can tell them how you have been studying, go over your exams, and they can help determine where improvements are needed.

2. Acknowledging Your Problems and Preparation - Sometimes, when we have problems, we don’t really want to acknowledge or deal with them right away because they make us feel more stressful. They even make us panic. However, by facing the problems early on, you can minimize long term effects of stress. For instance, when we have an exam coming up and we know that we’re not prepared, we feel stressed. We deal it by studying, but the stress is always there because the exam is not yet over. This is a good approach. But if we don’t study because of the stress we feel, we end up procrastinating worsening our situation.

3. Your Ability to Deal with Emotions - It’s good to recognize and acknowledge how we are feeling and not put them off. But at times, we might have to if the problems require a urgent response. In that case, we might have to stop feeling sad or depressed and just do what is needed to be done. For example, if we fail an exam, we become discouraged and we don’t study anymore. Instead, this is the time, where feeling discouraged is not going to get you anywhere. In this situation, you should be taking actions to figure out what went wrong and find a solution.

4. Your attitude and Outlook - Yes, sometimes, we can feel pessimistic after a negative event. But if we keep looking at the positives, we’re more likely to find solutions. For example, in my first year, I was doing so horribly that I felt that maybe I should just drop out. But instead, I figured that dropping out is not going to do any good, because you never know what might happen if you continued your studies.

5. Find Your Sense of Control - When problems happen to us, we feel that the event is beyond our control or the doings of others. And we usually take on that by blaming external factors. But if we learn to recognize how we might have contributed to the problems, we can learn to take control and fix them.