8 Ways College Students Can Cope with Stress

Stress and studying for a degree go hand in hand. It’s difficult to accomplish everything you need to in this stage of life, but stress can be detrimental to your schooling and future if you don’t keep it in check. Here are eight simple tips for managing the stress before it takes over your life.

1. Try CBD Oil

Many conventional tips for dealing with stress are difficult for the tired, busy college student to manage, but CBD oil is a simple trick that could make a big difference. It’s believed that CBD oil is very effective at reducing stress and anxiety.

You can buy CBD oil in an online shop and have it shipped to you without legal penalty as long as the THC content is non-existent or less than 0.3 percent THC. You can purchase CBD oil to hold under your tongue, capsules to swallow, or gummies to eat on the go. It’s an easy way to manage stress without a lot of side effects.

2. Change Your Sleep Habits

Telling a college student to change his/her sleep habits might seem like telling a leopard to change its spots, but it’s not impossible. Sleeping is a challenge when you’re studying for hours on some nights and partying with your friends on others.

However, if your stress levels are threatening your health, it would be wise to alter your sleep habits to effectively reduce your stress. The CDC recommends getting at least seven hours per sleep per night, although research shows that young adults and teens need more sleep than that for their health and vitality.

If possible, alter your sleep habits just enough to get the minimum seven hours per night. If needed, take a cat nap here or there to give you the necessary energy to push through. This is perhaps the most effective tool for combating stress issues.

3. Change Your Diet

You are what you eat, and junk food, processed carbs, and refined sugars equal stress. The ingredients in these foods are intake inhibitors, which can impact your entire health and wellbeing. They can promote cortisol production and create highs and lows that make it difficult to accomplish what you need.

Take a closer look at your diet and make changes where necessary to improve your diet. If you’re skipping meals, change that habit. If you’re eating a bag of chips instead of fruits and vegetables for your snack, make that change. These little things will improve your health and vitality while bringing down stress levels.

4. Exercise

Many colleges and universities have free or reduced access to workout facilities—take full advantage of this while you can! You’ll never fully value the benefits of a full-access gym membership at a free or reduced price until you’ve graduated, and you don’t have the perk anymore.

You’re a busy college student, so you don’t need to spend hours in the gym to work off some of that stress. Just devote 30 minutes per day to some moderate workout intensity.

If you have a lot of reading to do, take your books with you and study while on the treadmill or bicycle. You could also do some reading in between sets while lifting weights.

If you don’t have access to a gym, get creative. You might take a long route to walk to class or walk home from class. You could also do at-home workout videos. You might even be able to start a workout group in your apartment complex. This will give you camaraderie that might help with stress relief as well as accountability for getting your workout in daily.

5. Work on Your Social Life

Even the most introverted of individuals need people to help them relieve stress, feel loved and accepted, and understand their roles in life. You don’t have to spend every waking moment with someone else to work on your stress levels but having more of a social life could strongly impact your stress levels.

Finding a friend or two with which you have plenty in common gives you an outlet for venting your feelings. It also provides you a companion or two for participating in stress-relieving activities. It’s well worth the time spent to find friends who get you.

6. Reduce Your Caffeine Intake

Caffeine might seem like exactly what you need to counteract your stress levels; it might give you exactly what you need to power through and get all the work done that you need to. However, caffeine could be a source of your extra stress and anxiety.

An overabundance of caffeine can cause a number of symptoms that mimic stress like a racing heartbeat, gastrointestinal problems, and even headaches. Reducing the amount of caffeine, you drink regularly could help to reverse some of these stress effects and improve your lifestyle.

If you need a way to maintain your energy, try some natural remedies like eating healthier, drinking more water, sleeping more, and taking a vitamin with a good vitamin B complex. These simple changes can significantly increase your energy levels and improve your life.

7. Pick Your Battles

When you’re in school, you might feel a keen pressure to keep up with your grades, do extracurriculars, and participate in internships. You will likely be very busy in college, and it will be good for you. However, you don’t need to be perfect, and you certainly don’t need to do it all.

Choose what’s most important for you to accomplish while you’re in school. Remember that unless you’re trying to maintain a scholarship, A’s are not nearly as important in the real world as you might think. When getting a job or even applying to a master’s program, a B-average transcript is heartily accepted, so maybe don’t stress getting perfect grades so much.

Additionally, if your extracurriculars are taking up too much of your time, choose which are most important and drop the rest. Life is too short to spend all of your time on the extras when the essential parts of your life are suffering because of stress.

8. Party Less

While letting off a little steam at a party is great for your stress levels, it can also become a bigger burden. If you’re somewhat of a party animal, that could be a key reason that you’re facing so much stress. Too much partying can result in a number of mental and physical health problems, starting with too much alcohol consumption.

To begin with, there’s a reason that the legal limit for drinking alcohol is 21: The human brain is not developed enough before the age of 21 to handle alcohol well. It can cause severe brain damage if one drinks too much before becoming of age. It can worsen the stress you already feel.

Additionally, alcohol impairs your focus, judgement, and even relationships. Partying can rob you of sleep, and your grades and extracurriculars will suffer as a result. For the sake of your expensive education, lay off the partying and focus a little more on your extracurriculars to truly combat your stress.