Chemistry test, World Cultures quiz, English essay, math test and a project for your elective class due the Tuesday before break. However, the stress doesn’t stop there. Once back from break, finals approach and classes begin to cram the last few weeks with ways to tie your grade in a bow. Whether you have an 89.2 or an 81.0, you have to study for those finals to bring up and keep grades. This is the most stressful time of the year. 

As the semester ends, students across all grade levels find themselves in one of the most academically stressful times of the year. According to a school wide survey with 51 responses, 82.45% of students said that the end of the semester is the most stressful time of the year, explaining that deadlines and finals are the main reasons. In the same survey, 75.5% of students said that school is the main reason they stress out at the end of the semester. 

Erin Fratella, an Advanced Placement (AP) psychology teacher, explained why these students may feel this way.

“They changed finals to before break, and I think it is exponentially more difficult than it was when the finals were after break,” Fratella said. “Stress levels increase tremendously when  finals are before winter break.” 

Stress levels at the school are on the rise, finals are coming up and students are stressing out. “Yeah, [students are], like, all at threat level,” Fratella said. Threat level consciousness is a response to stress.

According to an article published by Harvard Medical School, “the sympathetic nervous system starts the fight or flight response. It gives the body a burst of energy to fight the perceived danger and the parasympathetic nervous system acts a stop, and calms the body down once the danger has passed.”

Our fight or flight response is not supposed to be triggered for long.

 “If we’re constantly living in that state of sympathetic nervous system arousal, the resources have to come from somewhere else,” Fratella said. “You’re not metabolizing your food correctly. You’re not, like, getting blood oxygen saturation, correctly.The resources go to keeping you in threat level, so your body’s going to break down.”

But there’s many healthy ways to deal with stress.

Sophomore Micheal Chen said he uses music to cope with stress. 

“I compose and practice music when I am feeling very stressed,” Chen said.

Other students, such as sophomore Arjun Kaushal-Goel, make lists and plan on what they need to accomplish.

 But for many students, like sophomore Emersyn Willits, this is not the reality. “When I get stressed out in school I get overwhelmed and can’t sleep and spend hours doing homework each day on top of softball practice,” Willits said.  

Deadlines and due dates pile up with tests and club events, and students start to sacrifice things like their sleep. 

Some other healthy ways that students deal with stress, according to the survey, are watching a movie or a show, baking, painting, doing a coloring book, going for a walk, hanging out with friends or going to the gym.

But there are certain things that students should not be doing to cope with stress. 

“Sometimes I pull all-nighters just to get everything done,” said Georgie Centrico, senior. While this may seem like a smart way to get work done, it can do remarkable damage to your body and your brain, according to an article written by the Sleep Foundation. 

The article states that sleep deprivation has an immediate negative impact on a person’s ability to think. Cognitive thinking decreases, mood swings increase, there’s a loss of focus, hormone dysregulation starts, and many other issues come from sleep deprivation.

Sleep is the last thing to sacrifice especially when one is already under stress. 

“That long term potentiation is not going to happen, because that only happens during sleep,” Fratella said.

Long term potentiation is defined as: a persistent strengthening of synapses that is a crucial cellular mechanism for learning and memory, according to the National Library of Health. Without long term potentiation a person is not able to use what they learned later in a process of recall.

“You can put stuff in in a pretty accurate format, but when that cortisol and norepinephrine are really high, you can’t get stuff out right,” Fratella said. “That’s what we’re asking you to do in the finals. Not put stuff in, but get stuff out.”

According to an article published by Excelsior University, because sleep is so important, it is crucial for students to make a plan when it comes to studying. Without a plan it’s impossible to know what is most important to study.  Creating study plans leads to increased productivity and improved academic performance. And when work begins to pile up, people who make plans are able to complete it more efficiently.

Fratella said that she advises students to study with the pomodoro technique, where, according to an article by the University of British Columbia, starts by setting 25 minutes to work on a task. And during those 25 minutes, if one gets distracted and has the urge to do something else, simply write it down. Once the timer is up, complete the distractions or take a five minute break to  stretch or walk. Repeat that four times then take a 30 minute break and repeat it as much as one needs to.

Instead of muscling through all of one’s work, Fratella advises taking short naps as a way to get some sleep.

“Take a 90 minute nap,” Fratella said. “Or take a 20 minute nap and then get back to what you’re doing.” 

According to the survey, another way that students said they de-stress is by distracting themselves with social media. According to an article by the Mayo Clinic, the more time people spend consuming social media content, the more distressed they will feel. 

Consuming social media is another negative way that students attempt to de-stress, one survey respondent said they use “distractions on their phone” to cope with stress. 

  However, social media is not a way to escape. 

  “[Social media] really is like exhausting your brain’s resources. It’s not calming you down,” Fratella said. 

Fratella said she suggests people to self-impose a “tik-tok ban” during this stressful time to avoid wasting the brain’s resources on scrolling. 

According to Fratella, the best way to deal with stress is not to pick up the phone or to pull all-nighters. Instead people can make lists of what they have to do, schedule time out of their day dedicated to study without distraction and go outside and de-stress.