I have decided that I don’t believe in stress.

This revelation, which came to me sometime last week, has been overwhelmingly unpopular among the Whitman students I’ve shared it with:

“I’m stressed out,” someone will say.

“Oh. I don’t believe in stress,” I’ll respond.

Then there’s a pause and a blank stare. So I’ll continue:

“I just think stress is a relatively useless emotion. I find it unnecessary, often fabricated, counterproductive and I just don’t believe in it.”

“Yes, but how can you not believe in stress?”

“I just don’t. I refuse to.”

“That’s fucking bullshit, Sophie. I need a cigarette.”

I guess I have to grant stress the validity of existing, at least to some degree. The feeling is unmistakable: there’s a certain shit-oh-shit-oh-shit-oh-shit buzz that creeps up on you, usually at around 2:30 a.m. in the library on a week night. I suppose you can call that stress.

What bothers me is the sheer volume of students who let stress rule their lives, time and time again.
Evolutionarily, stress must exist to motivate us; to put a sense of urgency in our blood in order to get our adrenaline going and our feet moving. Other species must feel stress, too. Like, when a rabbit sees a wolf six feet away and licking his lips, the rabbit is bound to feel kind of stressed out, right?

But there’s no way that turning your paper in late, skipping your 9 o’clock because you just don’t have it in you to go, or sitting on the sidelines during practice is ever going to get you eaten alive.

After a double-all-nighter fueled by literally dozens of two-shots-in-the-darks and nausea-inducing energy drinks, this realization finally struck me. I sat on my bed, closed my eyes and thought, “There is no way this can be healthy.”

And I was right.

Here’s a quick lesson in health: According to medical researchers all over the world, stress is a huge risk factor in infectious disease and has even been said to cause cancer. In fact, the U.S. Center of Disease Control and Prevention says that 75 percent of all health problems reported to doctors in the U.S. are stress-related. This is no new discovery: Stress has been the subject of over 20,000 studies in the last 20 years. That’s how serious it is.

And yet, people take pride in their stress. Stress is supposed to make you tougher. Stress is supposed to demonstrate your strength and wit. Maybe enough stress will even get you laid (“Oh Jenny, I saw Sam on Ankeny this morning and he looked soooo stressed. I wanted to have sex with him there and then”).
That’s strange considering it’s comparable in health to obesity or cigarette-smoking.

Regardless, everyone gets stressed out. One might argue that it’s unpreventable. Every once in a while, you just need to feel stress. It pushes you forward. I’ve met many people of many different walks of life, and all of them have been stressed out at one time or another.

What’s amazing to me, though, is that out of every group of people I’ve ever come into contact with, college students exhibit by far the most stress. More than journalists on deadlines; more than actors before shows; more than businessmen after Wall Street took a major hit last summer; more than women on welfare living in housing projects in Chicago. College students are the most stressed out. Now that’s just silly.

College is supposed to be fun. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, folks: Most people in the world never get four years just to learn. Interested in jazz music? There’s a class for that! Like to dabble in book arts? You’re in luck! Really, it’s like we’ve won the ultimate lottery. We get to sit around all day and read and write and explore and grow.

And still, you can’t go to the library and say, “Hey, how are you?” without getting at least one “Stressed out,” as an automatic response.

Ultimately, I think too many students try too hard to be perfect. That ‘A’ on your transcript is just not as important as you think it is. As long as you’re doing something you love, it should never stress you out. If you’re not doing something you love, you shouldn’t be doing it.

Obviously it’s not that simple. Sometimes you know you want to learn the stuff on the syllabus, but the work it takes to get there is just so daunting, and the professor is just such a tough grader, and you don’t even know what an Oxford comma is, so how are you ever going to get the paper done? When I hit those moments, I try to put things into perspective. I take a deep breath, remind myself that I actually want to learn this stuff and if I don’t get the best score in the class I won’t tear myself up over it. I’m not going to take my ‘C+’ home and drown it in a box of PBR.

That’s one thing I can’t understand at all: I get the impression that there are a number of people on campus who party as hard as they can on Friday and Saturday night just to make the stress dissipate for two nights. What’s that all about? Doesn’t that just exacerbate the problem? On Sunday you’re just nursing a hangover and Chaucer is even less appealing than he was in class.

There’s a fine balance to being in college. We have to simultaneously take advantage of being academically pushed to our limits and of being in a unique social climate of like-minded people forced to coexist. Frankly, all the opportunities can be overwhelming.

Take them in moderation. Relax. Observe. Enjoy.

I was telling my freshman year roommate about my theory on stress, and to my surprise she said,
“Yeah, I don’t believe in stress, either.” She told me while she was studying abroad in Mexico she didn’t feel pressure to be perfect because all her classes were in Spanish and that was everyone else’s first language but not her’s. She just let it all go and did what she could. The experience kind of freed her.

Ultimately, life is short. College is shorter. Take the classes in the course catalogue that you wish you could take but they don’t fill any of your distribution requirements. Be able to laugh at yourself when you don’t succeed. Stress doesn’t have to be the Lord and Savior you pay your homages to: Just stop believing.