Academic Skills, Stresses and Successes!

Throughout your life, academics face a lot of competition for your time and energy. The road through academics is often rough sailing, despite your best efforts. Other forces are often working against you, and the sooner you identify them, the sooner you can build the skills to keep serious academic stress at bay. Academic skills are not something you are born with. Skills are acquired through learning, practicing, and applying throughout your life.

Academic Skills are the Vaccine for Academic Stress. They are the tools in your toolbox. Different vaccines/tools exist for the different types of stress and struggles you encounter as you go through your academic life. Time Management, Stress Management, and Study Skills are a few of the most useful Academic Skills that can be used to adjust elements of your life before they become huge sources of stress, and will create a smoother arrival at academic success.

The academic experience can be particularly difficult for international students, first year undergraduate students, and first year graduate students, first generation students (graduate and undergraduate). Another group of students that often face academic hardship are students with mental and physical disabilities. Academic stress is intensified by, and can intensify anxiety, test anxiety, procrastination, perfectionism and depression.

What Does Academic Stress Look Like?

Academic stress and struggles could include usual or upsetting changes in your academic life. Maybe you are having trouble getting motivated to go to class, completing assignments, or remembering what you read while still reading. Maybe you notice that you are having more difficulty writing papers, or studying for a particular topic than you are used to. These are all examples of Academic Struggles that place a lot of stress on all aspects of your life. Academic Stress often leads to text anxiety, procrastination, and even depression, and generalized anxiety, which in turn lead to a decrease in grades, added stress.

Academic stress and struggles can occur suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, or they can be something that you have been experiencing for as long as you can remember going to school. Many people feel guilty, responsible, and ashamed; It is not your fault, and not your responsibility to deal with it on your own. But there are resources to access, counselors to talk to, peers to commiserate with, get the help that you deserve!