I woke up one day last semester at 6 a.m., an ungodly hour I try to avoid being awake for at all costs. As I laid there in bed, staring at the light starting to creep in through the blinds, I tried to figure out why I had woken up so early. The fact I’d gone to bed at 3:30 a.m. should have meant I’d sleep straight to my 8 a.m. alarm, but that was unfortunately not the case. I didn’t feel well, I knew that. I felt anxious, my pulse was racing, and then there was the nausea. It wouldn’t go away, and then somehow thinking about it made it get a whole lot worse. I jumped out of bed and collapsed in front of the trash can, dry heaving. That sucked.
The same feeling of anxiety and nausea hounded me for at least a week, which was handy in helping me realize that I really do hate being nauseated. I was also incredibly emotional. I would cry at the slightest provocation, or get irrationally angry at nothing. I thought about going to Student Health, but it was midterms. There was no time for that. I had to just deal with it.
Late at night the day I turned in the last big paper of the week, I was sitting with a good friend of mine, just chatting. I started to tell her how I was feeling. She was the first person I’d told simply because I had been too busy to stop and talk to someone. She just looked at me quietly. “It’s stress,” she said with a slight shrug.
This floored me. I simply couldn’t wrap my head around it. I was a rising senior and a pre-med, Biology major. Believe me when I say I know stress. Stress and I are very good friends. I thought that I reveled in it. I complained about the workload, as we all do, but part of me enjoyed that I thought I could cope with it all. I was not weak, I was strong. I was strong enough to cope with the stress. I was strong enough to excel in spite of it.
But being nauseated for a week is not “winning” the battle against stress. Feeling clammy and faint for a week is most definitely not coping well. Crying uncontrollably in the women’s bathroom on the third floor of Regents for an hour is not reveling in stress.
The word “stress” is used in such a banal way that we forget that it has real, physiological impacts. Headline after headline warns against the effects of chronic stress on the body, blaring out threats of heart attacks, high blood pressure, strokes, and all sorts of other unpleasant things. And yet, these warnings go unnoticed by our generation. We embody that ever-youthful confidence in our physical invincibility. Why do healthy young people need to care about the diseases of the old?
Let’s be real here, that is an absurdly naïve paradigm. And, it needs to stop. Being 20 years old is not the world’s best vaccine, inducing immunity to stress. As any doctor or, hell, even a blood pressure cuff will tell you, even at our young, supposedly healthy age, we can suffer from the physical and mental effects of stress. Blatantly ignoring the symptoms of stress will do nothing good for our health—not now, not decades from now.
There’s a communal spirit at Georgetown, a camaraderie formed through the mutual recognition of relentless academic work, internships, jobs, and ambitions. I firmly believe that community is absolutely necessary to survive in this stressful environment. But, as a community, we thrive on that stress, and we perpetuate it.
We consume unhealthy amounts of coffee and laugh at the jitters, headaches, and short tempers that accompany a caffeine addiction. We compete to beat the curve, and internalize that crushing pressure. We anxiously and frantically seek to excel, and in doing so push the very limits of our bodies. Simply put, we make ourselves sick with stress.
There is such a thing as too much competition, and there is such a thing as too much stress. I’m not quite naïve enough to believe that the ethos of competition will ever not pervade Georgetown. Hell, I’ve partaken in that competitive spirit enough to know that it’s here to stay. But, I am naïve enough to hope that we won’t succumb to the damaging symptoms of stress. I hope above all that we’ll channel that competition not into debilitating physical and mental effects, but into productive and healthy manners of coping. Because unless we come to the realization that we actually need to work on dealing with stress, it won’t be long until it will affect us all.
