Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most stressed out of them all? Whether you’re a freshman or a senior, you’ve probably come across the modern version of this question in a conversation like this with your friends:
“Oh my gosh, I’m so tired. I only got four hours of sleep last night because I was up late working on a project, and then had to wake up at 8 a.m. for a meeting with my adviser.”
“I know! I pulled an all-nighter for my 20-pager last night, and now I have to write another paper tonight.”
If you do recognize this—as we’re sure about 99% of you do—you have just witnessed and/or participated in stress one-upmanship.
What is stress one-upmanship?
Stress one-upmanship is a competition between you and your peers to prove who is being placed under the most demanding and stressful circumstances—from an overload of homework to extracurriculars that meet for hours on end to an intense semester internship.
“I actually have dealt with this quite a bit, since one of my good friends in college was a big one-upper,” says one anonymous senior from Northeastern University. “Any time I would say how I was tired, she’d have to be even more tired, or if I had a lot of homework, she always had to comment about how she had so much more. Usually the comment would start with ‘Don’t even talk to me about…’ and go on to rant about why everything was worse for her.”
Bragging about stress is a little messed up when you stop to think about it. After all, stress can lead to a number of terrible consequences, from memory loss to sickness to isolation to unhappiness. Why should we be proud of that?
Why we do it
Our society mistakenly associates stress with productivity, success, and resilience. If you’re still awake to tell the tale of that 20-pager, you’re an unstoppable, working machine, and you can take on anything. If you’re not filling your free time with 5,000 extracurriculars, then you must not be taking full advantage of the opportunities available to you. In other words, if you’re not stressed, you can’t count yourself among the other die-hard collegiettes who are challenging themselves to see just how little sleep and minimal relaxation time they can handle.
Dr. Rick Brinkman, a public speaker and naturopathic physician, distinguishes between venting and wallowing about stress. Venting, he says, “is done with the positive intent to feel better. It has an endpoint (a time frame)… If however, there is no positive intent [or] time frame… then the act of [wallowing] about one’s busy schedule with another person can actually make [the situation] worse.” Wallowing, unlike venting, is not therapeutic, because you’re augmenting the negative aspects of your schedule instead of complaining and then finding a way to protect your physical, emotional, and mental well-being from the ill effects of stress.
What you should do instead
Having a conversation with your friends and comparing your busy schedules will only make you more stressed out. So what should you do about stress one-upmanship?
Dr. Brinkman suggests supporting your peers with “positive projections.” “A positive projection,” he says, “is when you state something positive about the other person with the conviction that it’s true… For example if someone tells me how stressed and busy he or she is… I might reference a past success like, ‘Though I know it seems intense now, I’m sure you’ll find a way like you did in Psychology 101 last semester.’”
You can even suggest a study break for you and your friend—“Wow, that sounds stressful. Let’s go out for ice cream sometime this weekend so we can take a little bit of a breather.” This will help to diffuse the competition, let her know that you’re here to support her, and allow you both to relax a little bit.
If your friend doesn’t take the hint that you’re not going to compare busy schedules, Rachel, a freshman at Butler University, has a backup plan. “[I]f [my roommate] continues to complain, we say something along the lines of, ‘You know how to handle it from here, so good luck.’ From that point, it’s not our business or our interest to enable her attitude, so we do our best to stay out of it.”
There is one aspect of stress one-upmanship that we here at HC want you to keep: being proud of yourself. College is an environment full of demands—professors giving you 300 pages of reading to complete in a matter of days, extracurriculars expecting you to put in your all—and you’re handling all of them, day by day. That is pretty impressive. And trust us: not everyone can do it. You are successful, productive, and resilient, not because of stress, but because somehow, you manage to get it all done. So step away from the mirror, collegiettes; you know what you’re capable of, you’re proud of it, and you don’t need to prove it.