The week has just begun and yet you feel like you’re drowning already. You have to read a few chapters and write a 1,000-word analysis for AP Literature, you were assigned to solve 95 problems in College Algebra and you have to answer a full questionnaire for being a teacher mentee. On top of all that, your parents refuse to let you skip swim practice because you already skipped once last week. You won’t be able to finish all of your algebra homework, but tomorrow you have to work from after school to 9 p.m., so you can’t finish it then. An all-nighter it is. Stress felt by many students has been known to cause anxiety, affecting the way they interact with their peers and people close to them, how they complete (or don’t complete) their schoolwork, and how they behave in learning and professional environments. How a student deals with this pressure can make all the difference. “I get maybe seven hours of sleep a night, and that’s never enough,” Cayden Anderson, freshman, said. “Last semester was a bigger load [of homework]. I usually had homework in every class. Keeping up with homework was much harder when the winter sports season came, to balance it out. I am on the swim team; I’m in Girls’ Service Society (GSS) and Family, Career and Community Leaders of America (FCCLA). I think the swim team is a large majority of any stress that I have.” Rachelle Anderson, Cayden’s mother, told her to pick one extracurricular activity and one sport on top of her homework. She realizes Cayden participates in more, but is always there to counsel Cayden when it all becomes too much, and to encourage her to step back and prioritize. “I think part of it is learning how to balance [everything],” Rachelle Anderson said. “If balanced, there will be the right amount of time devoted to what’s important. I encourage [Cayden] to take care of the basics. Obviously school comes first, before everything else.” Sometimes students have too much going on in whatever clubs, musical groups or sports teams they are a part of. Clayton Sparrow, junior, is often overwhelmed by the events he takes part in because of his love for music. He is currently preparing himself for a competition called Solo and Ensemble. He will be competing with two solos and an ensemble; however a fellow trombone player has broken his collarbone, setting the whole ensemble back. On top of these smaller competitions, Sparrow is involved in Springfield Youth Symphony, and debating joining Echo of the Ozarks, a new indoor marching program. “I don’t have the time to get a job because of band,” Sparrow said. “It consumes most of my time— and homework, you can’t forget about that. Practicing my trombone takes up a lot of time because I have high standards for myself.” One of the hardest parts of growing up is learning how to prioritize and balance everything that goes on in a student’s life, Dr. Marissa Casey, psychologist with Burrell Behavioral Health says. “There is a certain amount of stress that is helpful. Stress that motivates you to work hard, but it doesn’t completely overwhelm you,” Casey said. “This stress helps you grow, but it’s not to the point where you’re worrying … all the time. When you can’t sleep at night, or if you don’t want to go to school because you’re feeling really sick to your stomach about what’s happening … there is too much stress.” Even if a student is feeling completely overwhelmed, he or she can look at the pressure in a positive way and use it as a motivator. Other students may see it pessimistically and therefore cause that negative thought process to cloud the way they see their actions. This is still in the level of healthy stress. If a student is normally a very optimistic person and is getting sick by the pressures, then it has crossed a line of acceptable versus intolerable weight on one’s back. “Some nights I have three hours of homework,” Zach Smalling, junior, said. “I do think it’s too much, but that’s just how the real world is and how college is going to be so I might as well get used to it. I’m involved in tennis, Peer Mediation, Student Council and Boys Service Club. My parents and my teachers do expect highly of me, especially my mom. She does expect me to get really good grades all the time. Sometimes balancing that out with everything else a normal teenager should do, it’s stressful.” Remembering what is important and setting goals are ways students can lower stress. “It just comes down to prioritizing, and it’s easy for everybody … to sometimes lose track of what is most important, so if you just refocus and look at what’s most important, and do that first … then that stress level goes down if you know that you’ve done what’s absolutely necessary first, and done the best you can do,” Rachelle Anderson said.