Surveys seem to indicate that college students are having more and more trouble dealing with stress. If that’s true, why, and can schools do anything about it?

In today’s Martin Center article, Lucy Maher looks at those questions.

A surprisingly high 41 percent of students have thought about dropping out of college, with many saying that the reason was emotional stress. One reason for that, no doubt, is the risk of being “canceled” for having the wrong opinion about something.

She writes:

In The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt suggest that people struggle so much with mental-health issues these days in part because of the avoidance of stress or any other negative emotions. The authors consider how negative discussions are being taken out of classrooms and how students can now be punished for saying something that upsets somebody else. They discuss catastrophizing, in which students (or others) project onto something that has happened or will happen their utter inability to handle it. The authors state that this can be seen whenever people ask for things like trigger warnings.

That probably explains much of the increased stress. Can schools do anything about it?

Maher suggests one possibility: “One of the solutions offered by Lukianoff and Haidt is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). CBT is a way of training our minds to view the world in a more reasonable and positive way. Instead of catastrophizing and expecting the worst, we can focus our attention on what is actually likely to happen.”