The Gauge of Anxiety
Is Middlebury more stressed out than ever?
Pay no attention to the spa-like calm evoked by the butter-colored walls, arched windows and pendant lamps from über-high ceilings in Room 229 at Middlebury’s new Axinn Center. As the spring term tightens its grasp, the discussion topic here is stress.
“Why does it feel so stressful around here?” the posters—depicting Edvard Munch’s The Scream—plastered around campus have asked. “Does work hard/play hard translate into stress hard?” Tonight, 26 members of the Middlebury community have gathered in this soothing space on a Wednesday after dinner in an attempt to find not only some answers to those questions, but also a step toward some long-term solutions.
Larry Yarbrough, a religion professor whose smooth refereeing during a recent panel on the crisis in the Middle East has earned him the moderator position for the stress meeting, asks Elise Cohen ’11 about the pressure in her life. She’s majoring in psych, minoring in Chinese and training three hours a day for the Middlebury crew team. Cohen has too much homework, she says, and when she tries to decompress late at night by watching a TV show or messing around on the computer, she skimps on sleep. Then she’s exhausted, can’t focus, and is even more stressed. “I get so overwhelmed,” she says.
“I feel like I live in my room,” says Jenny, a senior who twists her curly hair around her finger. “We have to breathe—we should have lives outside the classroom.”
“Save Middlebury from the stress monster!” says Paul, a sophomore.
All joking aside, stress has become a big issue at Middlebury in the last few years, according to students, staff, and faculty members—so much so that the Ad-Hoc Committee on Campus Stress formed last year. And now, with the economy struggling, folks speak of stepping into a perfect storm of stressful convergences—uncertain job prospects, a frenetic social life fueled by a bevy of social media outlets, and the myriad choices and commitments that face most every college student.
Yet somewhere amidst all this is the vibrant busyness on which students have long thrived. “How do we really know what causes stress here at Middlebury?” says Yarbrough to the group. “And how do we identify what the antidotes for stress are?”
Big Fish, Little Fish
Our popular usage of the word stress, according to Mark Stefani, a visiting assistant professor of psychology at Middlebury, dates back to the 1930s, when researcher Hans Selye was studying the way rats responded to challenging situations. Selye borrowed the term “stress” from structural engineering. Today, we’re the rats ourselves, scurrying from one situation to the next—especially when we are in a higher-education environment.
“Stress is endemic to college campuses, and probably always has been,” says Stefani. “Students are subjected to regular deadline pressures and evaluations in the classroom. In addition, there are for many—if not most—students the added pressures of living more independent lives away from the supervision of parents.”
But while all campuses have a certain amount of stress, higher-level institutions have proportionately high levels of stress because of the achievement pressure, says Stanford-based stress-expert Robert Sapolsky, the author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Look at most Middlebury applications and you’ll see an ocean of straight-As, along with entrepreneurs, Olympic-caliber athletes and virtuosos, many of whom were valedictorians, captain of the football team, or editor of their newspaper while in high school.
Then, he says, many students go from being a big fish in a little pond to a little fish in a big pond and having to navigate a completely new social world—all while trying to keep their heads above water. “Very much a Stanford problem,” says Sapolsky. “No matter how stressed you are, you’re supposed to seem graceful and golden and unruffled, just gliding through life without a care and excelling at everything.”
Sapolsky knows a thing or two about stress at Middlebury, too. Last spring, he was invited to speak at the College’s annual convocation series by the newly formed Ad-Hoc Committee on Campus Stress, which came together after students and faculty found themselves constantly talking about how stressful Middlebury can be. Composing the committee are Cohen and Stefani along with health, wellness, and counseling staff members; other students and professors; and Chaplain Laurie Jordan ’78.
The idea of an anti-stress committee at Middlebury in the late 1970s? “It would have seemed laughable,” admits Jordan. Back then, she says, it was tough, and you pulled an occasional all-nighter, but it wasn’t nearly the craziness of today. “There are so many ways in which Middlebury is a more diverse and interesting place that it was before,” says Jordan. “But there does seem to be more of a frenetic pace…you just want to scoop someone up and hug them.”
