Oh, you're ready? Uh-huh. Oh, I'm sorry.
Whenever you're ready, you guys. My name is Nick Schilke. I'm a freshman here at Emory.
And today we're going to present on stressing college students. And my name's Hannah McNair. And obviously, we might have hit on some topics that we already discussed today. But hopefully, we talk about a few other effects, like academic and physical effects, that weren't touched upon yet. So.
What is stress, first of all? In terms of the scientific of stress, stress is essentially the... is a response to demand that's placed on the body. So oftentimes the body reacts in terms of a physical response so... So the brain will release hormones, mainly adrenaline and cortisol, to respond to...
I'm sorry, I don't know what's going on. I think everyone started, yeah. Are you holding that? No, this doesn't work.
It's on Google. And we should just try this again. Yeah, I think we're just gonna save it for today. So again, my name is Nicholas Shultz and I'm a freshman here at Emory. We are going to be presenting on stress in college students.
And my name is Taylor. I'm a freshman as well in the college. So first of all, we'd like to talk about what exactly... is stress and in terms of the scientifics behind stress, stress is essentially the body's reaction to a demand that's placed upon the body or placed upon oneself.
So generally the body perceives that stressor as a physical. physical danger. So the body responds by releasing a number of hormones, most notably cortisol and adrenaline. And when these two hormones are released, it creates a lot of, for one, it leads to a lot of reactions in the body and it creates a lot of exertion of energy.
So that's why people will usually feel really exhausted when they have a stressor in their life and it leads to a lot of release of energy. There's two different types of stress, chronic and acute stress. If you learn and understand stress, you may be able to get better.
So acute stress is temporary stress. It's the immediate reaction to a stressor. So for example, if you were walking in the water and a bear happened to pop out in a path, and all the glucose and other stress hormones rushed to your legs, get your body ready to react or run. And then chronic stress is when the body stays in the form of stressing all the time.
So that's when it gets dangerous and can be really unhealthy for the body. So we also looked at a kind of reason why students were stressed. And this particular study, which comes from a university in the Midwest, a couple hundred participants were asked to respond to...
Respond to different types of stress. In this case they looked at Intrapersonal stressors which were things that happen internally with the body things like eating and sleeping habits interpersonal habits which are relations between people so yourself and maybe Other parents or something and then academic and environmental stressors and as it turned out the most common stressor was an interpersonal stressor So if you think about that It sort of makes it easier to manage because the most important stressors in these students'lives were actually things that were going on inside of them. So like they say up here, change in sleep, vacations and breaks, and change in eating.
All these were things that are pretty easy to manage if you sit down and look at what's really affecting you. And as it turns out, the most common type of stressor are these types that are happening in the body. So I want to explain the effects stress has on your body physically. First I'm going to go into the science of it.
So the nervous system, there's two parts of the nervous system, the synthetic nervous system and parasympathetic nervous system. There's nerves that go all through your body to every organ and the sympathetic nervous system is the initial, is what reacts initially to a stressor. what speeds your heart rates, hires your blood pressure and then the parasympathetic nervous system is the part that slows down your body and gets your body ready to relax.
So if you're chronically stressed the sympathetic nervous system doesn't let the parasympathetic nervous system take over so you're just always commonly stressed, always have high blood pressure and your heart is always beating fast. which can cause all these problems to your body. In college students, it's typical for skin breakouts like acne. You can develop cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure. Your immune system is actually really affected.
That's why it seems people who are more chronically stressed always have a cold or the flu. And the brain, it also affects the brain, which gives headaches. can even memory function could be lost. And one other side effect of stress that we noted actually comes from a study from Germany, University of Germany, was the effect of stress on poor nutrition. As it turns out, when students get stressed, like we talked about, they, with the reaction of the hormones, there's a huge release of energy, so students feel that they need to replenish those.
those exerted calories when they feel exhausted that's why students who are stressed are more likely to develop poor nutrition habits and as it turns out I know one preventionist before it's actually more common in females to to practice binge eating which is essentially eating more uncontrollably not taking note of your consumption so it's more common for stressors to lead to poor nutrition habits Okay, so stress can affect the college student academically. So I found a study that was at the University of Minnesota where they researched and surveyed about 10,000 students from about 14 different colleges. And they compared GPAs to bad health habits, so stress, drinking alcohol, doing drugs. So they found that the most...
important factor to most important factor for GPA is stress and about 70% of the students who said they were stressed about 30% of them said it was affecting their GPA so they also they also found that if students are able to manage their stress more efficiently than students who can manage their stress their GPA are higher than other students who can manage their stress. And so these are just a few ways to manage stress and we'll obviously get into some more specifics at Amory but this one study from Dartmouth College noted that it's actually very simple for students to manage stress and watch students work. taught how to manage stress, it was very easy for them as long as they knew the ways.
So of course some of the big ones just relaxing and eating healthy again those are just simple ways to set your body in the right direction and keep you on a regulated schedule again so there's no disruption in sleep or eating habits. And then of course turning to gurus to discuss problems. One of the biggest things was as long as students stay away from those addictive behaviors, turning to alcohol, drugs, tobacco, things like caffeine, then they were generally okay. But that was one of the most important factors to stay away from those. Emory.
We have some specific services that obviously we didn't talk about today, but the counseling center, which is at 1462 Plifton Road, the biology building. Last year in the spring, the law school did a program about pet therapy. So during finals week, they brought in pets to the law school library. And about students came down and they would play with the dogs for about 20 minutes. And students felt that when they were playing with the dogs, they were less stressed.
The exams weighed less on them. And there was about six dogs. It went for about two weeks.
from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. I know I have a dog at home and I know I obviously miss my dog, but you can't have a dog at college in your dorm, so that's a way you can relieve your stress by playing with animals.
And then of course this was actually something we found online, just 100 ways to manage your stress for every student. So just to take away from all this, there's a lot of small little things in here. like using a stress ball and playing with a pet like we said, getting a massage, relaxing, that can help manage that stress.
But again the most important thing, the most important way to deal with stress is just identifying the stressors in your life and tackling them so your body stays regulated, so your schedule stays regulated, and just really relaxing yourself so nothing's...