Managing the Madness
But wait—is stress all that bad? As the anti-stress meeting at the Axinn Center gets into full-throttle mode, a couple of students confess that they actually need pressure in order to get to work. Chaplain Jordan says that she was so stressed trying to write her Ash Wednesday sermon, she was suddenly able to lock into a state of flow—the term psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi coined to describe a concentrated, happy focus.

In truth, stress does give us a shot of adrenaline in order to meet the challenge ahead, part of the “fight or flight” phenomenon that the animal kingdom experiences. And as Yonna McShane, director of the office of learning resources, tells the Axinn Center group, well-being comes from a balance of safety and challenge. “If the safety is too high, we’re bored,” she says. “And boredom is an incredibly stressful state.”

But as Sapolsky explains in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, most animals do just that—fight or flee, and thus turn off the stress response. But when we chronically worry, we can do damage to the body. “In an environment when stressors tend to be frequent, long lasting, and mental,” says Stefani, “stress hormone levels stay chronically high and contribute to the pathological states that include high blood pressure, increased susceptibility to illness, loss of libido and reproductive abilities, apathy, and anxiety.”

So while the idea of a stress committee might have seemed laughable a few decades ago, managing stress at Middlebury today is a serious matter. Sapolsky, for one, suggests that students take advantage of what they have going for them. “They have youth and almost certainly health, and those are pretty good places to be in life, in terms of weathering challenge,” he says. “They’re all in a privileged setting. They almost effortlessly have a social community . . . a culture that encourages trying new things, something that often can be very stress-reducing. . . . And it is often a place that overtly values and facilitates helping the less fortunate . . . one of the best versions of social connectiveness for decreasing stress.”

Daniere, meanwhile, reports that the College has taken the “less is more” idea to heart by advising less programming—an effort bolstered, however painfully, by budget cuts. “The bulletin boards are dramatically less cluttered with event after event,” says Daniere. “Weirdly enough, I feel the economy could have a very positive influence on our campus because we are not offering as much, and maybe that’s OK.”

Then there are myriad solutions tossed out by individuals. “The College does a great job of keeping the student population happy and as calm as possible,” says Marie Russo ’11. “Still it would be nice if professors didn’t schedule midterm exams during the same week. It makes for an absolutely terrible fourth week of classes.”

In the Axinn Center, meeting attendees suggest some stress-relievers, both personal and institutional: creating quiet dorms, leaving the cell phone at home, busting myths about needing sky-high GPAs for grad school, becoming more supportive of people who do less, and ceasing to confuse excellence with unattainable perfection.

For many, it comes down to simplifying, and Yarbrough has some simple parting words for the students, faculty, and staff scrambling to get to their next commitment this evening. “It has become a badge of honor to talk about how busy you are,” he says. “Try, for the next week, to see if you can go without saying to someone how busy you are.”

Maybe it’s his suggestion, or maybe it’s those spa-colored walls in this room. But suddenly, everyone seems to slow down. The stress monster? Nowhere in sight.

Sarah Tuff ’95 is a freelance writer in Burlington, Vermont.

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