December has arrived, along with cold weather and the frenzy of students cramming in anticipation of finals week, Dec. 14th-18th. AP Psychology teacher Lauren Byler-Garcia explained the importance of managing stress and maintaining a healthy sleep schedule, especially during this time. Stress puts people in bad moods, making it hard for them to sleep, which causes other mental health issues and continues in a vicious cycle, Byler said in a Zoom interview.
“Stress can often cause us to get sick, so right now that’s a huge issue if you encounter someone with COVID. If you are someone who’s susceptible to COVID, you might have worse symptoms, or you might be more likely to experience symptoms that you would have been more asymptomatic to,” Byler said. “For instance, you are an essential worker and people are coming in with colds; you’re more likely to catch a cold or the flu, and all of those things would add stress to your plate.”
When stressed, students are typically in a bad mood, affecting the people around them, Byler said. Their support system and their mental health worsen, making students more susceptible to depression and suicidal thoughts.
“Sometimes stress can form itself in terms of anxiety, and anxiety can turn into things like panic attacks, where our body shuts down. We have a hard time breathing, or we can’t focus, ” Byler said. “There’s too many things coming at us at once, and so therefore, we often will just kind of shut down completely instead of being able to actually complete all the tasks we have to do.”
Along with discussing the detrimental effects of ignoring stress, Byler also gave advice on how to manage and cope with the stress many students feel during finals week. One healthy way to manage stress is to stay organized, Byler said. By staying organized, students can plan out deadlines, so if anything unexpected happens, students would be able to plan around that event, making it less stressful.
“I think it’s really smart when kids look at what their grade is in a class and look at how much they potentially need to study,” Byler said. “They might find that they only need like a 50% in order to keep their grade in the class.”
Prioritizing is key when it comes to studying, Byler said. If students are stretched thin, they need to look at their weak points instead of focusing on concepts they have already mastered, or else they are wasting their time, she explained.
“Getting exercise often helps with individuals, pumping endorphins through their system, which helps relieve stress, but it might be that you’re afraid to do this because you’re trying to study; you’re trying to get everything done,” Byler said. “But it could be that you have the teachers who have lectures recorded, so you can listen to it while you’re walking, or you have flashcards that you take with you and scroll through while you’re walking.”
Byler explains why cramming—staying up late and losing sleep—does more harm than good. The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve has shown that if people try to learn everything the night before or even the morning before, they will forget the majority of information they were cramming, Byler said. If students are up all night cramming, they will not have time to sleep to help them retain information, leading to exhaustion, which in turn causes the information to get mixed up and jumbled, she explained.
“Sleep is an essential thing that you need,” Byler said. “Long term, if you deprive yourself of sleep, you can cause yourself to have anxiety and depression, which obviously means more treatment than just getting a full night’s sleep.”