In case you were too busy being stressed out by college, you should know that Stress Awareness Day happened on Nov. 2. For us college students, chronic stress is a reality of our environment, whether we accept it or not. We are always looking ahead to future deadlines, papers, and exams, to the point where we often neglect our mental health in the present. I’m here to tell you that the human brain isn’t adapted for this system of education, and that your chronic stress is a valid, physiologically rooted response to college life.

Before I go further, we’ve got to disambiguate between acute and chronic stress. Acute stress is short-term, like when you’re running away from a tiger. It’ll be over shortly, because you either make a quick escape or get turned into dinner. Now, imagine that every time you escape the tiger, a new one shows up. This overlapping of acute stress over time produces chronic stress, a phenomenon which is found rarely in nature, but commonly in our education system.

In stressful scenarios, the body activates the acute stress response, also known as fight-or-flight. When we are about to start running away from the tiger, this system revs up and speeds up our heart rate, blood pressure, and breathing to ensure that we will be able to fight or escape more easily. Importantly, the stress response also makes us extremely conscious of perceived threats in our environment. After the encounter is over, this system turns itself off, and we go back to a resting state. The problem is that, with chronic stress, the stress response is never fully turned off.

You have surely noticed the stress response right before an exam or presentation, but what you might not realize is that, as long as you are worrying about future assignments, you are continually engaging the stress response and all of the physical and mental issues that come with it. Perhaps you are able to sense that, sometimes, even just thinking about a stressful situation in the far future will cause you to become stressed. This simply didn’t occur in the lives of our ancient ancestors; they lived in the moment, not knowing what stressors were coming in the future.

Obviously, we can’t emulate our ancestors and try to abstain from knowledge of the future, so we are, to a significant extent, stuck with chronic stress. When it comes to assignments that we can do at any time, the best route is to get them done as soon as possible to minimize your chronic stress. For set-time assignments like exams and presentations, the best we can do is to interrupt our chronic stress with whatever distracting activity we most enjoy. I’m not encouraging you to procrastinate…well, actually, I am, but only on assignments that need to be completed at a certain time. Don’t get carried away!

Ultimately, we will all experience some degree of chronic stress, and that’s OK. You don’t need to apologize for your human physiology. We are all adapted to a different time, and it’s about time that our society acknowledges the reality of chronic stress in college life.