Stress Isn't Your Enemy
Most advice out there will teach you how to avoid stress. That's not what student-athletes need. Between practice, lifting, travel, classes and exams, stress is guaranteed, the athletes who thrive aren't the ones who avoid it. They're the ones who learn to use it, to overcome the negative and embrace the positive stresses.
We’re going to break down what separates the good stress from the bad, how to turn pressure into focus, and the simple systems that keep you performing in the classroom, on the field, and in life. Prefer to watch?
We also have a full video breaking it down for you on out YouTube: Performing with stress. Take back control.
Good Stress vs Bad Stress
There are two kinds of stress, and they feel very different.
Eustress (positive stress) sharpens your focus and lifts performance. It usually comes in short, intense bursts. It's the buzz before a big game that gets you ready to attack.
Distress (negative stress) leaves you overwhelmed and overburdened. Instead of feeling empowered, you feel paralyzed. It drains your energy rather than adding to it.
Train Stress like a muscle
Anyone that has been to the gym will know: to build muscle, you must stress the muscle. Give it a reason to grow, through effort, doing the reps and pushing yourself. Enough load triggers growth; but do too much and you can't recover, or you get hurt, and then you will see no growth. If you walk in next week unable to match last week's work, you overdid it.
Studying works the same way. You can't cram endlessly, skip recovery, and expect to absorb it all, day after day. Doing more than you can handle is a recipe for achieving very little, doing an awful lot, and eventually burning out. The goal is to match your workload with your ability to recover.
Feeling stress isn’t a weakness, it is showing you that you are going out of your comfort zone and are in fact growing. Overtime your stress will feel less powerful and you’ll have to branch out to go further, either with what you’re doing on continue to find new challenges, or stay in the position you are in all your life.
Know Your Limits
The first principle of managing stress is knowing your boundaries. This requires you to track how much time you spend on things and how much you're taking on. Then build gradually instead of loading up all at once. Your semester already does this: early weeks introduce the course, and the content gets harder as layers stack up.
What Works Best For You
This isn’t what works best for your roommate, your teammates, or even you in high school. Some people plan an essay two weeks out and are able to get it done early with a high quality of work and efficiency. Others find that without the pressure of a looming deadline, the work is flat and progress is slow. Then, a day or two before it's due, urgency kicks in and the quality jumps. The environment hasn’t changed, the task hasn’t changed, just their sense of urgency. Urgency can be tool to get you making the most of your time and avoid
Neither approach is wrong, but be honest about which one is you. For some, a last-minute rush creates good stress. For others, watching the clock tick from one hour to ten minutes tips straight into distress. Or you are no good at predicting how long it will take and you miss your deadline, both should be avoided, and you can do it by creating urgency of your own.
If you lack urgency, create it purposefully. An hour set aside for a task is usually more productive than a whole open day. Pack your schedule so every work block has a reason to get done and the pressure if you can’t get it done.
Perception Matters
You can feel both kinds of stress in the same situation. The difference is perception. Eustress looks like an opportunity. Distress looks like a failure waiting to happen. Distress usually comes from thinking about the future: What if I don't get this right? The fix is to bring yourself back to the present and the task in front of you. Here are a few ways to get back to the present:
3 Physical Techniques to Calm Down:
5-4-3-2-1 grounding. Name five things you can see, four you can touch, three you can hear, two you can smell and one you can taste. It sounds strange, but it pulls you straight back into the room.
Box breathing. Inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 4, exhale for 4, hold for 4. It slows your breathing and heart rate.
Progressive muscle relaxation. Start at your feet and work up, contracting each muscle group in turn. Simple contractions can help bring cortisol down.
Appreciate Your Preparation:
It's easy to fixate on what you haven't done. Keep a short weekly journal of practices completed and study sessions logged. Before a big moment, read it back. You did the work, and you're ready.
Find the Cause:
College is full of new unknowns, so expect to feel stressed at times. The key is asking why. Exam stress is often really "I haven't prepared." If you have prepared and still fear the result, remember that every outcome carries a lesson, but only if you were fully invested in the process. So get obsessed with preparation.
Establish Your MITs
What is on your Most Important Things List. A calendar full of classes, practice and work shifts doesn't tell you what matters today. Each morning, write your top three must-dos on a notes app or whiteboard. Then go further: what's the single most important thing? Everything else fits around it. Act with urgency on what matters, but don't treat every task as a crisis. Sort what needs doing now, what can wait until tomorrow, and what needs help from someone else. Then accept what you can't control.
Become Flexible
You are likely not as good a predicting how long something will take as you hope, create buffer zones to help avoid missing deadlines or producing lackluster work. Your better off being safe than sorry when it comes to scheduling time for work. As we know life can throw us curve balls and mess up our plans, so we have to be felxible. Build in buffer times in addition to the key blocks that mark your non-negotiables, so saying no to low-priority tasks gets easier, and you have a clear plan before the week starts. If your plan only works when everything goes perfectly, it isn't a good plan.
Create Routines & Control the Controllables
Routines (some call them superstitions) are small cues that can calm you down before a something big is about to happen. One example I use: study with the same pen you'll use in the exam, and bring a backup in case it fails. But the visual cue of having the pen in my hands is something that brings me calm during an exam. Consistency helps; rigidity doesn't.
Focus on what you can control: your schedule, your food, your sleep, your practice attendance and your exam prep. You can't control the outcome or team selection. Accepting that frees you to focus on performing itself. Dwelling on the future, or on past mistakes, only pulls you out of the present.
Do It For You
Worrying about how others see you is one of the fastest ways to pile on stress with nothing to show for it. If you only act in ways others approve of, you'll never chase what you think matters. College is about finding what you want and going after it: making mistakes, getting better, and leaving one step closer to who you want to be. Not entering a field you don't care about, after studying a degree you didn’t want, for a life you don’t want because someone else chose it. Stress can even guide you here. Does a goal excite you, or does it only bring anxiety?
The Recap
Performing well while keeping distress low comes down to a few habits:
Prioritize what matters most each day.
Use positive stress to create urgency.
Build routines that calm you when you panic.
Trust your preparation and perform, not worrying about the outcome.
Ask for help when you need it.
You DON’T Have To Do It ALONE.
If stress keeps stacking up week after week, talk to someone: a coach, a counselor, an athletic trainer or a teammate. Solutions are often hard to see on your own. You don't need to reach your breaking point before getting support.
At AcaAthlete Advantage, we help student-athletes build the routines, systems and tools to balance academics, athletics and the rest of college life. Want more tailored coaching? Get in touch. And subscribe on YouTube for weekly videos on the how to make the most of your college student-athlete experience.
