Helping Students Confront and Deal with Stress and Procrastination

Students are frequently subject to considerable stress that may become distress during academic semesters. But this stress occurs at more or less regular intervals that can be predicted at the outset of the semester. Further, some students' obligations at the beginning of the semester predict that they will suffer distress later on. This paper describes a program that consists of some principles of time and stress management, two informal models of student stress, and steps that students can take to lessen distress. Goals are: (1) to reinstate psychologically students' past academic distress as a way of making them more receptive to suggestions for avoiding such predictable distress in the future; (2) to help students see that their distress results in part from procrastination; and (3) to induce them to try to reduce stress that normally comes later in the semester by increasing it at the outset.