Finals disrupt lives of students, create unhealthy stress levels

I’m dying. Well, not really, but I feel like I’m dying. I’m short of breath, I have… I’m dying. Well, not really, but I feel like I’m dying. I’m short of breath, I have difficulty sleeping and my stomach has so many knots in it I feel as if someone could have been awarded a merit badge for the state that it’s in – and why? Why do I feel so horrible? What is it that has so effectively hobbled and crippled me?

It’s stress.

Stress, stress, stress! I am under a truly horrifying amount of pressure, maybe as much as an astronaut who has to fix a broken piece of his shuttle while in space so that he and his friends won’t be burned to a crisp and killed during re-entry. Oh, fine, you’re right. Not that much pressure. That’s more “life, death etc.” as Virginia Woolf puts it; what I’m feeling is more life, finals etc. You know. That sort of stress.

Which is utterly horrible. Who isn’t a mess right now? To slightly modify a popular saying, I would like to suggest that if you aren’t stressed out right now, you simply haven’t been attending your classes.

Actually, that’s wrong. If you haven’t been attending your classes, you are an utter wreck right now, running about, going to office hours, borrowing notes and feeling that if the world were the ocean, you would be the part that was hopelessly drowning.

Have you been to the computer labs lately? Have you seen the people’s faces in there? It’s like an audition for extras in the sort of movie where mutated children, or ancestral curses, or something terribly gory kills all the extras. People look scared at those computers, with their paperbacks next to them, cursing and frantically typing a paper – or a column, I suppose – that’s due in 30 minutes, and all the while they are achingly aware that no matter how quickly they finish the paper, the computer lab employees are still going to take forever to separate it into neat little piles.

It isn’t just in the computer labs. Everyone looks like lost souls around campus, everyone seemingly composed of equal parts panic and fear. You hear whispered conversations in Hillman over impossible expectations and absurd T.A. demands. You see haunted eyes in the Cathedral. You can barely recognize yourself in the mirror, and why? Because of a stupid term paper?

Yes. Our lives are being gutted, torn maliciously apart and disrupted because every class we are in demands that everything is due at once. How am I not supposed to look a little freaked out these days? I have papers due that I haven’t written, tests scheduled that I have no time to study for, festive winter beers to drink – and when? When will I have time to do all of these things? Will I ever be able to accomplish all of the things that demand finishing and, I don’t know, maybe read a book that hasn’t been assigned?

Or is this simply the way it works? Will life always be this miserable weight that I am unable to lift, kind of like that “Saturday Night Live” skit of the All Drug Olympics in which a drug-addled Soviet weightlifter tears his arms off while attempting to lift a ridiculously heavy weight – which was completely hilarious, but probably wouldn’t be as funny if it was real. Probably.

I digress. I believe the direction I was going with this was toward a critique of our culture and its insane demands on us to do all things at all times, thus producing never-ending, ever-escalating amounts of stress. I saw Robert Sapolsky, the scientist/author from Stanford University, when he lectured in Pittsburgh, and he talked a lot about stress and the weird things it can do, like stress dwarfism, but that’s another column.

His lecture focused on stress as a normal biological reaction, and how stress is important if you’re a gazelle who has just gotten attacked by a leopard. A lot of that gazelle’s ability to survive, he explained, lies in the fact that stress floods its system with endorphins and adrenaline, allowing it to escape. This reaction also exists in humans, but when our bodies become flooded with undue amounts of stress because of a long line at the grocery store, or a mortgage, as he explained, our systems will suffer severe consequences. Stress operates best as a short-term effect, and he pointed out that we have set up a system in which we are stressed out from the moment we wake up to the moment that we die.

So what was his advice? I think it had something to do with trying to flip through a tabloid when the cashier calls for a price check, and just not worry about it. And I guess that’s all we can do. We have to try and not freak out over stuff and deal with problems as they go and write that paper, take that test and etc.

After all, even if we get stressed out, it could be worse. A leopard could be trying to attack you while you’re writing that 12-page research paper. Just imagine how bad that would suck, huh?

Go ahead and e-mail Kevin at kjs34@pitt.edu. He’s got plenty of time to respond.