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Stress is a very relevant topic that has played a large role in everyone's lives at some point. Be it a test, big game, an interview, school, or maybe just everyday life, stress is a major topic. However, the way we deal with stress can make a large impact on our mental and physical health.

Before anything starts on how to manage or get rid of stress, we have to look back at the basics and ask ourselves “What is stress?”

“I think when we talk about the issue of stress, first it's always a response to stress. It's a response to our environment. So I think part of it is hard to get a hold of the thought about stress. Is it something that permeates every moment of our lives,” Mr. Cole said.

Stress is a large thing that plagues our society today, it keeps us from doing things we love and reaching our goals. As Cole said, it's a difficult thing to get the exact thought about stress itself. It is very important for people to learn how to not only manage stress but find a way to lower it in their lives as well.

In order to achieve this goal, it challenges you as a person to find your own personal stress reliever. Many of the main stressors involve social media, time management, news and personal life, as well as school. Stressors also depend on the age of the person and their own life.

“It depends on the age, for example Seniors, a stressor is for sure is the college application process, what they want to do with their life and what they want to major in. Often for Freshmen, they might be stressing more on fitting into high school and making friends. That can be a big trigger,” counselor, Mrs. Bucheit, said.

“There's plenty of research now that social media is extraordinarily toxic for our psyche and how it has been engineered. I recommend the Netflix documentary called “Social Dilemma”, all of this has been engineered to hijack our brains with a very deep level and universally it has a negative effect on our psychological state,” Cole said.

Stress doesn’t only affect our mental state it also affects our physical state and relationships with the people around us.

“Stressors can change, just about everything in health class we go over any of the physical effects of stress. When it comes down to it can increase your weight, it's called psychosomatic response and some results are also headaches, irritability, mood swings but really physically it does make you gain weight,” said health teacher, Mr. Browning.

Mentally stress can make you distance yourself from others, as well as start to pick up harmful habits. This can also lead to anxiety and other mental disorders if stress is not lowered or properly dealt with.

Though stress is hard to completely stop or fix all at once, there are many ways to get to that point.

“Exercise can minimize cortisol levels, cortisol is a stress hormone, it also helps you sleep and sleep is also good. As well as time management is very good so people can manage their time in their schedule. Also, avoiding anything that could turn into a habit,” Browning said.

“One thing that you can do is just sit and you can do this in any situation you can be in the middle of class just focus on slowing down your breathing concentrate on your breathing and try to smooth out the rhythm of the breath you. Center yourself so try to get out of your head because that's a key part of the stress response being locked in your thinking and just focus on smoothing out your breath, but it's much of your conscious energy into breathing slowly and evenly,” Cole said.

“There's some important things like just general healthy habits are important getting a I could schedule getting enough sleep exercising is really important eating healthy is important to some of those things that even for adults to serve as an important I think all the students don't like to hear this limiting your screen time I think seeing all of that and spending a bunch of time on Tik Tok and social media can not always be beneficial for your mental health. With everything that's going on in the news that is definitely a stressor right now. Another may be limiting the amount of time you're on screen, spending time with friends talking and that's important for you to release stress and just finding that you're passionate about painting or playing sports or playing an instrument because they're all great things to do to relieve stress,” Bucheit said.

Life can be stressful for everyone, especially now. If you ever feel stressed, try to use these methods or talk to someone close about it.