'Stress' photo (c) 2007, Stephen Day - license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Stress is a big issue for our students, and I thought I’d bring together some helpful resources on the topic.

You might also be interested in The Best Posts & Articles On Recent Study About Student Anxiety.

Here are my choices of The Best Resources For Learning About Teens & Stress:

Teens and Stress is a PBS News Hour video that I’ve embedded below:

Here are some previous posts I’ve written on the topic:

How Stress Affects Our Students (& Their Parents) — Plus, How We’re Trying To Help

How We Can Help Our Students Deal With Stress

“Scientists find how relaxed minds remember better”

Wow, This Is A “Must-Read” Article On The Brain & Learning!

Interview: How Does Classroom Stress Affect Learning? is by Anthony Cody at Ed Week.

Back to school: Dealing with academic stress describes experiments and helpful interventions.

Stress does shrink your brain, research shows reports on a study that found “suffering from stress for long periods of time can shrink the brain.” Unfortunately, the newspaper article does not actually cite the source of the study.

Newsweek recently ran long article on people lack of self-control in spending and saving. It provides a readable overview of research on self-control, though most of it won’t be new to readers of this blog or my books. It did share information on something that most of us in the classroom know already from our experience, but I hadn’t seen research on it before: reducing anxiety increases self-control.

Extreme Stress Could Shrink The Brain is from The Huffington Post and reports on some recent studies.

Stress Changes How People Make Decisions is from The Association for Psychological Research. Here’s an excerpt:

Feeling stressed changes how people weigh risk and reward…. under stress, people pay more attention to the upside of a possible outcome.

This means when people under stress are making a difficult decision, they may pay more attention to the upsides of the alternatives they’re considering and less to the downsides. So someone who’s deciding whether to take a new job and is feeling stressed by the decision might weigh the increase in salary more heavily than the worse commute.

The increased focus on the positive also helps explain why stress plays a role in addictions, and people under stress have a harder time controlling their urges. “The compulsion to get that reward comes stronger and they’re less able to resist it,” Mather says. So a person who’s under stress might think only about the good feelings they’ll get from a drug, while the downsides shrink into the distance.

It’s a reminder– for me, at least — that when a student is having self-control issues, there may be more than meets the eye.


It’s Good to Be the Top Banana
is by Jonah Lehrer and appeared in The Wall Street Journal. It discusses research that has found stress is greatly increased by feelings of powerlessness.

Here are several online “stress tests” I’m adding to this list (let me know of other suggestions):

Stress assessment: Rate your stress level is from The Mayo Clinic.

This Stress Test is from The Mental Health Foundation.

The Stress-O-Meter is from The Centers For Disease Control and Prevention.

A Stress Test For Children is from The Escambia School District, and cannot be taken online.

The Stress Test is from The BBC.

Helping Teenagers With Stress is a nice hand-out from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Teens and Stress is the same video I’ve previously posted on this list, but this version is not hosted on YouTube and could be more useful to teachers whose content filters block that site.

Stress and Coping Center is from Kids Health.

Help Students De-Stress for Success is from Edutopia.

Ten Things You Should Know About Stress is by Eric Jensen.

Stress-Busting Smiles is from The Wall Street Journal.

A Simple Daily Intervention Decreases Employee Stress is from The Harvard Business Review. Here’s an excerpt:

Stress levels and physical complaints declined by roughly 15% after employees were directed to spend 10 minutes writing about three things that had gone well each day, says a team of researchers led by Joyce E. Bono of the University of Florida.

America’s Teens Outscore Adults On Stress is from TIME Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

Since 2007, the American Psychological Association (APA) has conducted a survey of different aspects of stress in America. This year’s analysis focused on teens, and on a 10-point scale, adolescents ranked their stress at 5.8, compared with a score of 5.1 reported by adults.

“How to Handle Stress in the Moment” Is Best Piece I’ve Stress Management I’ve Seen

New Studies Show, Unsurprisingly, That Stress Reduces Self-Control & Metacognition

The Physical & Psychological Impacts Of Racism

People Are Loving This Teacher’s List Of Ways Students Can Deal With Stress is from BuzzFeed.

Teaching Teenagers to Cope With Social Stress is from The New York Times.

Six tactics to help your students deal with stress is from The Guardian.

Seven Ways to Reduce Stress in Anxious Times and may or may not be behind a paywall.

Stress May Not Only Affect the Brains of the Stressed is from Psychology Today.

The Stress Sweet Spot is from The NY Times.

How to Be More Resilient is from The NY Times.

High Anxiety: Imagining the future helps the present is from Character Lab.

The Other Side of Stress is also from Character Lab.

How to Keep Your Cool in High-Stress Situations is from The Harvard Business Review.

Changing Mindsets Can Protect Teens from Stress is from Psychology Today.

6 Questions To Help Students Cope With Everyday Stress is from Edutopia.

Tough New Growth is from Character Lab.

How Do You Hold It Together When You’re Feeling Stressed? is from The NY Times Learning Network.

The Best Way To Support People Who Are Stressed is from The Psy Blog.

Feedback and additional suggestions are welcome.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore the 700 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.