- Explain the stress response
- Distinguish acute and chronic stress
- Describe evidence-based coping strategies
Stress and Wellbeing
Your heart pounds before an exam for the same reason your ancestor’s did before a predator: the fight-or-flight response. The exam won’t eat you — but your body doesn’t know that.
Fight-or-flight is the sympathetic nervous system’s emergency mode: adrenaline and cortisol flood the body, raising heart rate, blood sugar and alertness — preparing you to fight or flee.
Key points
- Acute stress: short bursts that can sharpen performance.
- Chronic stress: the alarm stuck on — linked to anxiety, depression, heart disease, weakened immunity.
- What works: sleep, exercise, social connection, reframing, planned breaks.
- What doesn’t: avoidance, doomscrolling, substances — they borrow calm from tomorrow.
Studies show students who reinterpret butterflies as ‘my body preparing me to perform’ do better than those who try to calm down. Same arousal, different story.
Practice
Acute stress is a short-term response to an immediate challenge; chronic stress is prolonged activation that damages health.
Exercise/sleep for the body; reframing arousal as readiness, plus planned study breaks, for the mind.
- Stress is an evolved alarm: useful briefly, harmful chronically.
- Fight-or-flight mobilises the body via adrenaline and cortisol.
- Sleep, exercise and connection are the best buffers.
- How you interpret stress changes what it does to you.