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Many students experience acute or chronic stress in college. Two mental health clinicians share practices to help students self-soothe.
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Investing in student mental health is a retention concern for many higher education leaders but is also of concern in academic settings.
Students experiencing chronic stress are less likely to learn and perform well in class, so getting in front of a student’s crisis is critical to supporting their academic achievements.
Two college clinicians from Arizona shared the importance of teaching students psychological resilience and how it correlates to scholastic success at the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition Annual Conference in Seattle.
What’s the need: A summer 2023 Student Voice survey from Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse found half of respondents rated their mental health as fair or poor.
A November 2023 report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education explained that finances, the pressure to achieve and a perception that the world was unraveling were some of the key concerns for young adults surveyed.
Learning and memory work differently when under stress, explained Andrea Scherrer, counseling faculty at Scottsdale Community College, during the conference session. It can be difficult to process new information, because a person’s higher cognitive functions, such as abstract and reflective thinking, go off-line when under high stress.
Scherrer compared stress to a physical threat, such as a hungry tiger, and how, when faced with danger, the brain engages in fight, flight or freeze. “When there is an immediate threat to our immediate survival, your brain does things to keep you alive,” she said, and the same can be true with learning and processing information in the face of psychological threats.
A common example of this psychological response can be seen in students who experience math anxiety, or performance anxiety specifically around math classes. To the professor, it may appear that the student is procrastinating or avoiding taking required math courses, feeling frustration or resentment around math, but this is actually fight-or-flight responses kicking in.
How to help: To help students build resilience, higher education practitioners can empower them to practice self-regulation, said Thomas E. Rojo Aubrey, the counseling division chair at South Mountain Community College, in the session.
Self-regulation techniques provide acute relaxation and can be applied in real time, making the exercises practical for small experiences of discomfort or stress. While longer-form meditation exercises are important, they don’t help a student respond to everyday stressors in the moment, Aubrey said.
One technique is a body scan, also known as a wet noodle meditation. During this exercise, a person scans their entire body mentally, identifying each body sensation in the moment starting from the head and working down to their toes. This allows the person to identify where they’re holding tension and relax those muscles, providing momentary stress relief and calm.
Some other self-regulation practices include:
- Box breathing
- Mindfulness exercises
- Movement and exercise
- Meditation and prayer
- Positive self-talk
Self-regulation practices are not difficult to learn, but learning to apply them in the moment and do so with repetition is the challenge, Aubrey said. Faculty and staff can practice these behaviors themselves and teach them to students to encourage mental well-being.
Do you have a wellness tip that might help others encourage student success? Tell us about it.
