Stress Case

“59-year-old mother from Malacca urged youngsters not to be like her son, who chose to commit suicide when under pressure” (Isabellel, Ng & Raman, 2013, para. 1). Recently, there have been some news report about college students committed suicide all over the world. These issues had aroused much public attention. The factors of these incidents is stress faced by students in education. Most of the students will go through three stages of education which are primary, secondary and tertiary education. Many students still willing to pursue higher education even though the learning process takes a long time. This is because the education brings benefits to students such as gaining knowledge and experiences. Besides gaining knowledge from education, a person can master his or her social skills during the process of learning. Despite all the advantages in education, the learning process still cause some issues. The major issue in education is stress confronted by students which they cannot cope with it. Firstly, the definition of stress should be clarified in order to understand how it affects a student physically or emotionally. Stress is the physical and mental response to a stressor whereas stressor is a stressful event or situation (Zimbardo, Johnson & McCann, 2012). Not all stress has negative effects. Stress can be either adaptive or negative. Adaptive stress motivates people and drives people to accept life challenges. However, it is generally appreciated that negative stress is more often to occur in life. Negative stress occur when one is unable to deal with the stress confronted. Negative stress in education are mainly caused by workload and high expectations which have effects on an individual’s physical and emotion.