The Doctor Is In: Decision day anxieties

With the resumption of the traditional May 1 deadline, many prospective college students are finding it hard to commit.

As each student decides his or her top choice of admissions offer, the choices that factor into this year’s decisions have left many at a loss. Colleges vary widely in their response and recovery from the pandemic. Remote or in-person learning is now a choice and a heated debate. Questions such as, “How much has the quality of education changed? Does it still cost the same? And do I still have to pay the deposit?” are top concerns. Colleges, once proud of their healthy competition and firm in their stance, are scrambling to secure their selected pool and buckling under accounting gaps and slow student responses.

So how are students faring this year?

Phones dinged on that sunny May 1 Saturday. Birdy tweets sang out the happy news that baby is going to Mount Holyoke College this fall! The curiosity of many was unavoidable. After all, it is #commitday. Faces glued to screens expressed emotions of glee, shock, awe, admiration and jealousy. The question of “Where are you going?” trended all day. And with that came terrible anxieties.

2020 saw a sharp rise in prospective requests asking to extend this deadline. With a pandemic in full swing by April and decision day in May, it was no wonder. But colleges are now making rolling promises and offering tempting tuition incentives and campus perks making the choices abundant.

Unethical behaviors of saying yes to two schools have been strongly warned against, with penalties as severe as having admission offers rescinded. And since this deadline predominantly pertains to students applying to selective schools, the plot thickens, the peer pressure mounts and anxiety rears its head.

The feeling of anxiety is synonymous with apprehension, fear and worry, and is the body’s way of responding to a stressor. In this case, the stressor being the fear of what the future holds, can make Decision Day feel like Doomsday. Biologically, our bodies cannot tell the difference between the fear of death and the fear of lousy cafeteria food, and will rev our visceral functions into high gear.

Adrenaline, known as the “fight or flight” hormone, combined with noradrenaline, known for increasing our force of muscle contractions, is held back by a brain trained to will the body to sit. What results is contracted neck muscles on calm demeanor hunched over a monitor. In other words, you are wound up with muscles ready only to not fight or flee.

Because anxiety is a feeling, a healthy perspective is pivotal in curbing it. But how does one attain this healthy perspective? First, realize that the feeling of anxiety is a biological response to hormones. Second, acknowledge that anxiety is as much a physical phenomenon as much as it is mental. And third, use the same body to produce equal and opposite, “feel good” hormones called endorphins.

When we treat anxiety as a purely mental state, we often then miss out on the full benefit of what the body offers. If fear steers the stress bus and the bus is fueled by hormones, it needs to move. The expectation is that the wheels on the bus should go round and round.

So don’t just sit there rubbing your tight neck muscles. Flee! Or Fight. Your pick. Walk it off, kick-box it off, run it off, climb it off, hike it off, sports it off, gym it off and for the older ones of us reading this, you can garden, seat-yoga it off, golf it off. So many ways to get that release are available and simply tied to using our bodies.

Now, that fear may remain, as fears tend to, but the biological response of this stress is countered by the usurping of this adrenaline via physical activity and the new production of endorphin hormones.  

The remaining anxieties can find serenity in conversations, sounding boards, talk therapy and eventual acceptance of your decisions.

Not going to college. Not going away to college. Taking a gap year. Backpacking it across Europe or Texas. Staying home to work or staying home to play video games. Good for you, as long as you own it. And not let the stressors of life situations own you. 

If you find that despite these foundational treatments for everyday anxiety, it’s not enough for you or your anxieties have become a disorder, be kind to yourself and become your best advocate.

Talk to your doctor.