There are various reasons why college students experience high levels of stress. Many of these stressors can come from sources such as academics, study-related stress, emotional well-being, and recently COVID-19. Since the COVID-19 pandemic there has been a general increase in stress and anxiety on a global scale. Specifically, for college students, the transition from in-person to online learning, back to in-person has had many negative outcomes. In a study done by Keyserlingk et al. (2021), they delve into the stress outcomes of students before and after campus exposure to COVID-19. They focus on study-related stress, stress that is associated with coursework, procrastination, and study/life balance (Keyserlingk et al, 2021). In the study, they saw an increase in study/life balance, coursework, and procrastination stress in college students from the 2020 winter quarter to the spring quarter. Students still reported statistically significantly higher levels of stress at the end of the spring quarter of 2020 than in the winter quarter of 2020 (Keyserlingk et. al, 2021).
Due to the stressors stated above, there are also negative effects on sleeping and eating habits, which can overlap with the added stress from the COVID-19 pandemic. Grant Benham completed a study determining the effects of stress and sleep before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. In the study, it was determined that higher stress was significantly associated with poorer sleep quality and greater insomnia, along with later bedtime and shorter sleep duration (Benham, 2020). Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Benham also determined that students went to bed significantly later and woke up more than 2 hours before their normal times (Benham, 2020). As stated earlier, stress can have changed students' eating habits as well. In a study done by Jinkyung Choi (2020), he determined the perceived changes in eating habits and stress levels of freshmen and sophomores in college. In his study, more than 47% of students ate when they were stressed and fast food consumption multiple times a week had the highest frequency in the sample at 51.7% (Choi, 2020). He also determined that the high-stress group exhibited fewer healthy dietary behaviors as they tended to eat more sugar-based snacks, carbohydrate-rich food, fast food, and ready-prepared meals such as comfort food when compared with the low-stress group (Choi, 2020). In addition to perceived eating habits being altered in college, emotional eating can also be correlated to an increase in stress. Jiying Ling and Nagwan Zahry aimed to find relationships between perceived stress and emotional eating. They determined that perceived stress was positively correlated to emotional eating and negatively correlated to self-eating regulation (Ling & Zahry, 2021). When analyzing the 2 outcomes of stress, sleeping and eating habit changes, it can be seen that there is a negative association of stress with the well-being of college students. Added stress/extraneous stress leads to a plethora of emotional, psychological, mental, and physical changes that can affect more than getting “good grades” for these students.