The Gauge of Anxiety

Is Middlebury more stressed-out than ever? And if so, what is being done about it?

By Sarah Tuff '95
Illustrations by Gianpaolo Pagni

Pay no attention to the spa-like calm evoked by the butter-colored walls, arched windows and pendant lamps from über-high ceilings in Room 229 at Middlebury’s new Axinn Center. As the spring term tightens its grasp, the discussion topic here is stress.

“Why does it feel so stressful around here?” the posters—depicting Edvard Munch’s The Scream—plastered around campus have asked. “Does work hard/play hard translate into stress hard?” Tonight, 26 members of the Middlebury community have gathered in this soothing space on a Wednesday after dinner in an attempt to find not only some answers to those questions, but also a step toward some long-term solutions.

Larry Yarbrough, a religion professor whose smooth refereeing during a recent panel on the crisis in the Middle East has earned him the moderator position for the stress meeting, asks Elise Cohen ’11 about the pressure in her life. She’s majoring in psych, minoring in Chinese and training three hours a day for the Middlebury crew team. Cohen has too much homework, she says, and when she tries to decompress late at night by watching a TV show or messing around on the computer, she skimps on sleep. Then she’s exhausted, can’t focus, and is even more stressed. “I get so overwhelmed,” she says.

“I feel like I live in my room,” says Jenny, a senior who twists her curly hair around her finger. “We have to breathe—we should have lives outside the classroom.”

“Save Middlebury from the stress monster!” says Paul, a sophomore.
All joking aside, stress has become a big issue at Middlebury in the last few years, according to students, staff, and faculty members—so much so that the Ad-Hoc Committee on Campus Stress formed last year. And now, with the economy struggling, folks speak of stepping into a perfect storm of stressful convergences—uncertain job prospects, a frenetic social life fueled by a bevy of social media outlets, and the myriad choices and commitments that face most every college student.

Yet somewhere amidst all this is the vibrant busyness on which students have long thrived. “How do we really know what causes stress here at Middlebury?” says Yarbrough to the group. “And how do we identify what the antidotes for stress are?”

Big Fish, Little Fish

“Stress is endemic to college campuses, and probably always has been,” says Stefani. “Students are subjected to regular deadline pressures and evaluations in the classroom. In addition, there are for many—if not most—students the added pressures of living more independent lives away from the supervision of parents.”

But while all campuses have a certain amount of stress, higher-level institutions have proportionately high levels of stress because of the achievement pressure, says Stanford-based stress-expert Robert Sapolsky, the author of Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers. Look at most Middlebury applications and you’ll see an ocean of straight-As, along with entrepreneurs, Olympic-caliber athletes and virtuosos, many of whom were valedictorians, captain of the football team, or editor of their newspaper while in high school.

Then, he says, many students go from being a big fish in a little pond to a little fish in a big pond and having to navigate a completely new social world—all while trying to keep their heads above water. “Very much a Stanford problem,” says Sapolsky. “No matter how stressed you are, you’re supposed to seem graceful and golden and unruffled, just gliding through life without a care and excelling at everything.”

Sapolsky knows a thing or two about stress at Middlebury, too. Last spring, he was invited to speak at the College’s annual convocation series by the newly formed Ad-Hoc Committee on Campus Stress, which came together after students and faculty found themselves constantly talking about how stressful Middlebury can be. Composing the committee are Cohen and Stefani along with health, wellness, and counseling staff members; other students and professors; and Chaplain Laurie Jordan ’78.

The idea of an anti-stress committee at Middlebury in the late 1970s? “It would have seemed laughable,” admits Jordan. Back then, she says, it was tough, and you pulled an occasional all-nighter, but it wasn’t nearly the craziness of today. “There are so many ways in which Middlebury is a more diverse and interesting place that it was before,” says Jordan. “But there does seem to be more of a frenetic pace…you just want to scoop someone up and hug them.”

Midd Terms

“What I did find,” Nevadomsky tells the anti-stress gathering at Axinn, “was that there was an increase in the amount of ‘police work’ that was being assigned—pop quizzes given on readings or reaction papers.” Last year, Nevadomsky adds, he specifically chose courses with no police work. “It took a load off,” he says. “It was phenomenal—I could focus on the reading.”

Students aren’t the only ones feeling overwhelmed by too much work. “What I can’t stand is when I feel like I am supposed to be doing six things at once, and there are people with different expectations,” Chaplain Jordan tells the attendees at the anti-stress meeting. “Hours go by and nothing gets done—all you do is juggle, and then you end up with a bunch of broken eggs on the floor.”

Kristian Shaw ’11 says it’s not only the workload, but also the environment surrounding studies that cause stress. “In the classroom it gets really competitive,” she says. 

Many faculty members, however, point their fingers at what goes on outside the classroom as a major source of stress at the College today. Part of the way Middlebury applicants have been trained to pitch themselves, says psychologist and acting dean of the college Gus Jordan, is to be involved in a lot of things in high school. “Then they come to a school like Middlebury with lots of bright, highly motivated students and everything ramps up,” he says. “People are getting involved in not one extracurricular activity but ten, and they’re president of half of them.”

Indeed, at last count there were more than 170 Middlebury student organizations, ranging from the Architecture Group and the Bobolinks (one of eight a cappella groups) to the Flying Fists Juggling Brigade and the Swing Dance Club. “At mealtimes, it’s hard to have a real conversation, because people have all these things they’re running off to,” says Ben Johnston ’11. “The stress relievers just lead to more stress.”
Classmate Shaw says she quit playing intramural volleyball and volunteering for Habitat for Humanity so that she could focus on studying and working two jobs. But students like Cohen, who happily devotes three hours a day to crew practice, say that their extracurricular activities should be the last thing Middlebury trims to reduce stress on campus. “The most calming times,” she says, “are when I’m out on Lake Dunmore.”

Social Distortion

Baker Cook ’10 says that one of the most difficult things at Midd is the prospect of disappointing friends and peers—and failing to meet expectations. “With social stress, there’s a certain helplessness and hopelessness,” he says. “If I study hard for a test, even if it’s a difficult one, that studying is going to prepare me, and I’ll probably be OK. It’s within my control to a certain extent. But what textbook should I turn to for social problems?”

So while friendships and other relationships can be tremendous stress relievers, maintaining those ties can be stressful in itself, according to the particular developmental stage of young adults. And the ways in which students are attempting to connect to each other, say Margolis, can also add to the stress. He brings up the case of roommates who text each other while in the same room, their backs turned. Adds Jyoti Daniere, the College’s director of health and wellness education: “I never see a student just walking across campus,” she says. “They’re always texting or on the phone.”

The age when, say, a sophomore might stroll between Proctor and Voter and experience a eureka moment for a math problem or an English paper is mostly behind us. Students don’t take time to be deliberate and thoughtful because they’re constantly being overstimulated by technology, says Daniere—not just cell phones but also e-mail and the Internet and social-networking sites such as Facebook.

“Students can’t be by themselves—it’s too anxiety-provoking—and that’s a huge skill these folks aren’t garnering,” says Daniere. “You have a sense that you’re connected to the people you’re emailing, but you really aren’t. Facebook isn’t a real friendship.”

And then there is the gloomy news about the current economic crisis. As the executive director of the career services office at Middlebury, Jaye Roseborough sees firsthand the anxiety of seniors trying to find a job in this climate.

“They’re not as hopeful as they have been in years past,” says Roseborough. “Some of them had things lined up in the fall only to have them taken back once things really started to fall apart. That’s been devastating to many [students].”

Even more troubling, says Roseborough, is the thought of the students she’s not seeing—the ones who have “checked out” because they don’t see any point in hunting for a job. But denial is a normal thing with seniors every year, she says. “We bring home the reality that their academic experience of 16 years is coming to an end, and they want to stay in that bubble,” says Roseborough, adding that even positive news can be met with negative resistance. “We sometimes get feedback about how stressful our e-mails are,” she says, “and here we are sending out announcements about opportunities.”

Managing the Madness

In truth, stress does give us a shot of adrenaline in order to meet the challenge ahead, part of the “fight or flight” phenomenon that the animal kingdom experiences. And as Yonna McShane, director of the office of learning resources, tells the Axinn Center group, well-being comes from a balance of safety and challenge. “If the safety is too high, we’re bored,” she says. “And boredom is an incredibly stressful state.”

But as Sapolsky explains in Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, most animals do just that—fight or flee, and thus turn off the stress response. But when we chronically worry, we can do damage to the body. “In an environment when stressors tend to be frequent, long lasting, and mental,” says Stefani, “stress hormone levels stay chronically high and contribute to the pathological states that include high blood pressure, increased susceptibility to illness, loss of libido and reproductive abilities, apathy, and anxiety.”

So while the idea of a stress committee might have seemed laughable a few decades ago, managing stress at Middlebury today is a serious matter. Sapolsky, for one, suggests that students take advantage of what they have going for them. “They have youth and almost certainly health, and those are pretty good places to be in life, in terms of weathering challenge,” he says. “They’re all in a privileged setting. They almost effortlessly have a social community . . . a culture that encourages trying new things, something that often can be very stress-reducing. . . . And it is often a place that overtly values and facilitates helping the less fortunate . . . one of the best versions of social connectiveness for decreasing stress.”

Daniere, meanwhile, reports that the College has taken the “less is more” idea to heart by advising less programming—an effort bolstered, however painfully, by budget cuts. “The bulletin boards are dramatically less cluttered with event after event,” says Daniere. “Weirdly enough, I feel the economy could have a very positive influence on our campus because we are not offering as much, and maybe that’s OK.”

Then there are myriad solutions tossed out by individuals. “The College does a great job of keeping the student population happy and as calm as possible,” says Marie Russo ’11. “Still it would be nice if professors didn’t schedule midterm exams during the same week. It makes for an absolutely terrible fourth week of classes.”

In the Axinn Center, meeting attendees suggest some stress-relievers, both personal and institutional: creating quiet dorms, leaving the cell phone at home, busting myths about needing sky-high GPAs for grad school, becoming more supportive of people who do less, and ceasing to confuse excellence with unattainable perfection.

For many, it comes down to simplifying, and Yarbrough has some simple parting words for the students, faculty, and staff scrambling to get to their next commitment this evening. “It has become a badge of honor to talk about how busy you are,” he says. “Try, for the next week, to see if you can go without saying to someone how busy you are.”

Maybe it’s his suggestion, or maybe it’s those spa-colored walls in this room. But suddenly, everyone seems to slow down. The stress monster? Nowhere in sight.