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Essay on Stress Management Example
Essay on Stress Management Example
Take a closer look at this example essay on stress management. It shows how to build a strong academic essay with clear points and easy-to-follow ideas.
Oct 27, 2025
Essay Examples
3 min read
This essay example was written by our AI-powered writing tool. It's designed to help students see what a good academic essay looks like. It includes everything you need to understand how to write better essays: a short introduction, a clear main idea (thesis), well-organized body paragraphs, and a strong conclusion.
The Invisible Curriculum: Why Stress Management Should Be Taught in Schools
While educational institutions teach academic skills like math and literature, they largely disregard one of the most human feelings we all experience - stress. Stress is a biological function for survival; however, in our modern classroom, it is transformed into chronic anxiety and cognitive fatigue. Therefore, it is shocking (but not surprising) that educational institutions do not prioritize the teaching of stress management as part of a formal curriculum.
The argument presented in this paper is that stress management be taught in schools as a foundational life skill that is at least equally important to mathematics or writing, because of its direct implication for student health and performance, as well as long-term resilience to future mental distress.
Stress as a Barrier to Cognitive Performance
The way the human brain works when encountering acute stress is different. Research by the American Psychological Association has shown that under stress, working memory, attention span, and the ability to think critically all decline. Students who take standardized tests and/or encounter social pressure are likely to experience "cognitive shutdown," which we know is happening when the prefrontal cortex has been hijacked by the amygdala's fight-or-flight stress response. When students do not have the tools to manage these reactions, they are forced to improvise.
Oftentimes the tools students choose to improvise with are maladaptive. Examples include maladaptive coping mechanisms for procrastinating which lead to withdrawing from the task (i.e., avoidant coping), or stimulant or energizing techniques like caffeine.
Mental Health and Burnout Prevention
Chronic stress is often a gradual conditioner of mental health. Young people of today have the highest rates of reported anxiety or depression. Likely, the conditions of their lives, such as academic pressure & stress, social media, and the future not being certain, contribute to their mental health status. If little to no intervention is offered when stress is acute, then it has a tendency to calcify as burnout.
If schools embraced a level of emotional intelligence by asking students to practice journaling, sleep hygiene for well-being, and reframing cognitive distortions about self and world, then students would likely be able to foster an environment of psychological respect for everyone, including themselves, and not have stress-calming practitioners act as first responders to mental health crises.
Building Emotional Resilience for Adulthood
Even after graduating, stress does not stop. Time limits, career concerns, and family obligations are all examples of adult stressors that require resilience. We do not simply develop resilience by default; it is developed through the experience of manageable challenges and reflection on them. Schools are ideally situated to provide this type of training as developmental incubators.
Teaching stress theory, emotional regulation strategies, and recovery strategies would provide students with tools that last throughout their lifetime. Instead of learning in a manner similar to writing an essay or solving an equation, stress management is a skill learned and practiced that will lead to lifelong success.
Conclusion
Not surprisingly, stress is a major influence on cognition, emotion, and behavior. By not teaching students how to manage stress, schools are neglecting a basic skill necessary for students to thrive academically, and successfully navigate healthy adulthood. While we see a decline in mental health among youth and increased anxiety, it is no longer an option, but essential, for schools to teach students how to cope with stress.
If we evade our responsibility to integrate stress education into curricula, we risk graduating highly intelligent students unprepared for the stress associated with the pressing demands of modernity.
