Work is a gift from God. As students, this means our studies should bring us great delight and be a form of worship to our Creator. Too often, however, stress inhibits our ability to savor God’s great gift of learning in a higher education institution. I am not talking about eustress, which is a positive form of stress that allows us to view our problems as exciting challenges, but the high stress that inhibits our ability to function well and glorify God in our work.
Stress has a great function for our bodies: it helps us escape threatening situations by secreting hormones which mobilize our energy. In short periods of time (about three minutes), in hazardous circumstances, stress does its best work. However, when our stress persists for extended periods of time, what is meant to be a life-saving mechanism endangers our emotional, mental, and physical well-being.
What is worthy of stress? There are many things: running from a lion, saving a child from a burning building, or attacking a gunman. The trouble is that we’ve extended stress to many aspects of our lives that are not deserving of stress: minor relationship drama, sitting in traffic, math tests, etc. Because the Western world doesn’t have many lions chasing after us, we make our own stressors.
Often, these are persistent stressors that don’t go away after three minutes. Therefore, we keep our bodies in a state of excreting stress hormones to activate our energies. Because our bodies are not designed to perform at this level for long amounts of time, stress begins to eat at our health. Chronic stress makes our body more vulnerable to diabetes, heart disease, digestive issues, and other serious health problems.
How does this apply to us as Covenant College students? I want to remind you that you were not created to be persistently stressed. If schoolwork is causing you recurring and long lasting patterns of stress, you might consider reevaluating what place academics have in your life. I propose that they are not worth the health defects of stress (some of which are irreversible).
Further, I would suggest finding intrinsic motivation for your studies. In other words, study for the sake of learning. You’re paying good money for this education, enjoy it! Intrinsic motivation, or learning to learn rather than to gain an external reward, such as a good grade, is associated with less stress, better performance, and more positive emotions.
In contrast, extrinsic motivation, or doing something to gain an external reward, is associated with more stress and lower performance. Your brain is actually far more productive and creative when you’re feeling good, so by viewing your grade as secondary to learning, you are ironically more likely to do well in school.
When stress is evaluated from a design stance, it appears as though the Designer did not intend high stress to be a part of our daily work. It deteriorates our health, causes us to be anxious, and is often a product of idolizing our efforts. Work, which was present before the fall, should not be the cause of chronic stress, but a worshipful form of relating to our Maker.