Threat To Homeostasis: Contradictions Of Stress Among College Students

Literature Review

Introduction

Today, college students are under various stress, for example, academic stress, family stress and competing stress. Simultaneously, they concentrate on their academic performance, which is directly related to their GPA. Most of the college students are dying for higher GPA, so they can enhance their competitive advantage when they step into the society or get higher level of education. However, there might be some contradictions between the stress they face and their academic performance. Many students’ high stress screw up their academics by making them anxious and even hurting their mental healthy. In the meanwhile, many students benefits from their stress, because they are motivated to be more diligent to

Selye tries to define stress from physiological angle. She holds the point that the stress is caused because our body responds to the outside world, and something breaks the homeostasis in our body. It is our body who resolves the threat to the homeostasis, so our stress can be reduced. However, there are some different viewpoints. According to Lazarus and Folkman’s (1984) study, stress is not a physiological phenomenon, but a psychologicalphenomenon. In his theory, why people feel stress is that they find their perceived demands are more than the resources they perceived. Therefore, the cause of stress is the imbalance of the perceived demands and the perceived resources. Similarly, Hobfoll’s (1989) defines stress as the loss of resources, which means that if people loss resources, people will experience stress. Quick, Nelson and Hurrel (1997) defines stress in another way. They define stress as experiencing events that will hurt people’s physiological, physical or psychological wellbeing. They consider stress as something that may lead to mental and physical ill health, for example, nervousness and depression.

Fifth, many participants indicate that the predominant stressor is about families, communities and friends. In college life, students have to deal with family conflicts, due to the gap between parents and children. Some students even have to afford families’ financial problems. In the meanwhile, college is where students have a lot of opportunities to know new people, so how to make new friends and how to maintain these relationships become something makes students distracted.

Moses’ research also reflects that academic performance has impact on stress management. His research suggests that as cumulative grade-point average increase, respondents show better control of their stress.

Chen (2009) divides stress into positive and negative stress. In his opinion, under an optimal level of pressure, people are able to concentrate on their work and do a better job, while excessive stress will have a negative impact on performance. Therefore, he thinks the relationship between stress and performance can be illustrated with an inverted-U shape.