"Back To School" Brings Students "Back To Stress"

Many students over the summer enjoyed a relatively leisurely few months. Soon they will again begin their schooling season and many already have. Unfortunately, instead of experiencing a purely focused learning environment, many students' stress levels will ramp up quickly. It's that time of year again when students begin to prepare all semester long only to once again be enveloped in the stressful ritual of cramming for exams. Too many students can't take the pressure and drop out.

According to one study, the percentage of college students experiencing anxiety over their academic performance has grown significantly over the last two decades. The Higher Education Research Institute at the University of Califo
ia, Los Angeles (UCLA) found that over 30 percent of college freshmen feel "frequently overwhelmed by all I have to do," compared with 16 percent in 1985.

When students see their education as a challenge, stress can bring them an increased capacity to learn. But when it becomes a threat, stress creates feelings of helplessness and a foreboding sense of loss.

Stress is very subjective. What is too much for one is just right for another. Recurrent physical and psychological stress can diminish self-esteem, decrease interpersonal and academic effectiveness, create a cycle of self-blame and self-doubt and may cause physical illness.

In the New York Times best-selling book Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, author L. Ron Hubbard explains how these stressful situations affect our drive towards happiness, achievement and survival. And how these stressful mental states can even affect our physical health.

Dianetics describes just how the reactive or subconscious part of the mind can overwhelm the analytical mind--and why this causes stress. This mechanism in the mind managed to bury itself from view so thoroughly that only many years of exact research and careful testing uncovered it.

"This is the mind which makes a man suppress his hopes, which holds his apathies, which gives him irresolution when he should act and kills him before he has begun to live," writes Hubbard in Dianetics.

It is also the part of the mind that causes illnesses which have been described as psychosomatic--like headaches, allergies, asthma, high blood pressure and a host of other stress-induced ‘syndromes' and ailments.

Before stressful education further attacks the future leaders of our nation, it is vital that we truly educate them on how to overcome such anxiety and stress. Visit www.dianetics.org for more information.