Do you feel stressed about school? The SAT? Or even sports? Well, you are not the only one. Over 83% of teens experience stress or anxiety that is school-related. Multiple studies have shown that this generation of students is more stressed out than any before. In extreme cases, this stress can lead to depression, or even worse, suicide. We as a society need to minimize stress and help the students experiencing it.

Stress related to school can be caused by too much homework, sports, tests and more.   Students that experience stress handle it in different ways. The way that they handle it, though, is what leads to anxiety issues or depression.

Often times anxiety can be dismissed as an “illegitimate illness,” with people making excuses such as “they are just nervous for that test” or “they are anxious about that big game coming up.” While these individual instances can be easy to handle, a large pile-up could lead to anxiety, which ⅓ of all teens have.

One cause of stress is the transition between schools. With little information on what to expect or what to do, students are thrown into a new environment almost completely unprepared. The stress of where to go, what friends to make, how to succeed, and a million other little things can cause anxiety for new students. In addition, when you are moving to a new school, the teacher will be introducing new material, which students might not have learned the year before, forcing them to play catch up. There are also different expectations when entering different schools, making students have to act more mature even if they are not fully developed.

Student-athletes, pressured to thrive on the field, are also stressed out. They must commit to multiple hours of practice along with games. This, along with large amounts of homework, has created a generation of students with poor time management skills.

As you might know, having poor time management skills can be the result of poor quality, rushed, or even incomplete work. Stress can also be caused by too much homework. Teens have to juggle their personal lives, sports, jobs, college applications, and on top of all of that, multiple hours of stressful homework! This may leave teens feeling stressed and hopeless when they are working on homework they do not know how to do, and when it is done it is usually not their best quality. In fact, a new study shows that “the biggest cause of stress for children is too much homework.”

A simple way to control poor time management skills is by prioritizing. You can easily make a list of what you need to do and when. Then list them by the level of importance.

When your teacher writes that word “test” on the board your first instinct may be to shudder. Teachers have students learning new material at a rapid rate that it is hard for some students to comprehend the information. This causes stress among teens because they want to maintain their 4.0 GPA, but it is hard when they hardly understand the information that the teacher expects them to know. When studying it causes frustration from the students. Parents can also be a source of this, pressuring kids, by giving them lectures about how success in school leads to success in life.

Teenage stress can lead to many more problems and we as a society need to help our teenagers cope and handle stress in better ways than we are doing right now.