RISE Blog | Stress: Friend or Foe?

Written By: Bavitha Thomas and Beya Medellin, Peer Educators
Edited By: Joy Choo & Evangeline Flores
March 28th, 2025

College life is often painted as a time of freedom, fun, and self-discovery, but the reality for many students is that it can also be a time of extreme stress. Whether it’s the pressure to succeed academically, the challenge of fitting into a new community, financial worries, or the uncertainty of what’s going to happen in post-grad life. Stress is like Lubbock weather, it can be calm or stormy and sometimes unpredictable. Sometimes stress can feel like rain: it can mess with your plans, make you not want to get out of bed, get your shoes wet, and worst of all it can ruin a good hair day! After the rain has passed though, you see the clear skies, a rainbow, and the smell of fresh air. How can the grass always be green if it’s constantly sunny? Stress often gets a bad reputation, but it can be beneficial in many ways. We will dive into how to identify the difference between good and bad stress, managing stress in the long run, and healthy ways to cope with the feeling.

Unraveling Stress

Before going any further let’s talk about what stress is; stress is defined as “a natural human response that prompts us to address challenges and threats in our lives” (World Health Organization, 2023). Let’s break stress down further. Stress could be a deadline, meeting new people, or presenting projects. It can affect your physical wellbeing, causing headaches, stomach problems, an increase in heart rate, decreased energy, insomnia, a weakened immune system, or acne. Once that nerve-racking situation is over and the stress subsides, your body will begin to relax.

Now let’s take an exclusive look inside our bodies during these stressful moments. Stress is a fight or flight response that activates the sympathetic nervous system, releasing hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. This can happen in both positive and negative situations. This is shown in the body by “increased blood pressure and heart rate, increased breathing and muscle tension” (LeWine, 2024). This feeling often makes me feel kind of icky, but it can be a powerful motivator at times.

Thriving Under Pressure

Believe it or not, not all stress is bad. Positive stress, aka eustress, can actually motivate you to perform better. For instance, the excitement and anticipation of telling others about exciting news can possibly boost your energy levels and improve your mood. This feeling can be described as anticipatory excitement. This is when you're motivated by the thought of sharing your success with others. This can help you start your day off strong or even end it better than it started. Eustress is a beneficial response to attainable, rewarding, and challenging tasks that can contribute to psychological, physical and emotional well-being. According to the APA Dictionary of psychology, Eustress can be defined as, “the positive stress response, involving optimal levels of stimulation: a type of stress that results from challenging but attainable and enjoyable or worthwhile tasks” (APA Dictionary of Psychology, 2018).

An example is when you are starting the school semester after a much-needed break and settling into your home. It’s kind of scary to leave home and have to be independent for this chapter in your life. Maybe you will learn something about yourself you may not have been able to discover from staying in the comfort of your own home. The desire to perform well in the new atmosphere will give you some motivation to become better than you once were. All in all, these stressors can increase psychological, physical, and emotional aspects of your life. Psychologically, it improves self-efficacy, resilience, and autonomy. Physically, it improves strength and endurance as seen in a workout. Lastly, emotionally, it supports contentment, inspiration and flow (Lindberg, 2019). Now that we have addressed positive stress, let’s look into a subject, we all have been familiar with at one point, distress, or “negative stress.”

Decoding Distress

Distress is a concept that is familiar to everyone, that if left unmanaged, can be detrimental to your overall wellbeing. This “bad” stress can cause a person to feel burned out and feel an inability to cope. Distress can be defined as, “the negative stress response, often involving negative affect and physiological reactivity: a type of stress that results from being overwhelmed by demands, losses, or perceived threats” (APA Dictionary of Psychology, 2018).

Distress can form in many ways. It could be pulling all-nighters for a project that is worth 40% of your grade. I won’t lie, there have been times where I thought I had a lot of time to do an assignment, but as the date drew closer, I realized time slipped by me, and I had to deal with my major project and the anxiety that surrounded me. Combining this with an overwhelming workload of your classes can also increase your distress. As we get used to the new semester of classes the workload is different for each instructor and at times you have a long to-do list that you don’t even know where to begin.

The distress can lead to feelings of being overwhelmed and difficulty coping with difficult tasks. Your physical health can be affected along with mental health issues. Taking care of yourself is key to ensuring you’re enjoying life and doing what makes you happy. Your academic performance could decline, as well as sleep disturbances, and social withdrawal if you don’t prioritize your own health and wellbeing. Prolonged stress may lead to health issues such as anxiety, depression and a weakened immune system (Villines, 2022). After being reminded of the negative stress, let’s not forget there is positive stress out there, and how to manage the two!

Finding the Calm in the Storm and Coping with Chaos

Having too much or too little eustress and distress can be detrimental to one’s wellbeing, so it’s important to know how to properly manage the two.

Stress curve

The stress curve above will help you learn to recognize your stress levels through awareness to decide if it’s helpful or harmful. Awareness is made up of three interconnected components which are thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. Thoughts are what we think which affect our feelings and actions. There are emotions which can affect what you think and how you behave. Lastly there’s your behaviors which is what you do that can affect how you think and feel. You can see how the three are interlinked, which is why we need to be aware of the amount of stress that’s put onto us and how it’s linked to other components.

Now that we know how to figure out what kind of stress we have, let’s look at techniques that can keep eustress. Accepting that there are some events that you can’t control. Being assertive (feelings or beliefs and opinions) rather than aggressive (angry or defensive). Being able to “allow yourself to have social support and spending time with people you love” can help improve eustress (Ragland, 2023).

Looking at ways to decrease distress can allow a fixed mindset to turn into a growth mindset by speaking positive affirmations to yourself, learning to manage your time more efficiently and making time for hobbies and interests. Allowing yourself to have boundaries and say “no” when it comes to excess stress in your life (Ragland, 2023). Although managing positive and negative stress may seem overwhelming at first, with a variety of strategies to choose from you’ll find techniques that work for you!

What do you do with this?

Woah now! That was a lot of information, huh? Don’t worry, we’ll do a quick refresh. Stress is a reaction of our mind and body combined with a stressor, and it is inevitable. There are two kinds of stress: eustress (good) and distress (bad). We learned the difference between the two and how to analyze which stress we are currently facing. Once stress is determined on the stress curve model, we then practice ways to ensure we are at the peak of the bell curve stress model! I personally like yoga at the Rec Center or using the Shmoody app to connect and learn with other Red Raiders! Often stress can feel lonely, but everyone has their own stressors, and people have their own unique ways to cope with stress. I hope you learned something new today and noticed some stressors in your life that you can tackle with new insight.