Anxiety of success: Why students are forced to handle so much of pressure

Indian society, in general, has a classical notion of success. The first part consists of passing the most difficult medical or engineering exams, such as IIT-JEE and NEET, respectively. Next comes enrollment to top management schools like IIM. And if you go through UPSC-CSE, commonly called the civil service, that’s success 3.0, giving you a comfortable place in India’s bureaucratic setup. The stakes are high, and so is the pressure involved. However, sometimes this pressure is too much to cope with.

“Year after year, we see young people preparing for ultra-competitive exams like the UPSC, in OPDs struggling with stress and depression,” says Dr. Jyoti Kapoor, a senior psychiatrist and founder of Manasthali, an organization that deals with of mental health. Students fresh out of school preparing for IITs and NEETs also suffer from burnout due to long hours of preparation and uncertainty about the future. In several cases, they need counseling and medication to deal with stress,” he added.

While everyone experiences exam pressure, do some of the more ultra-competitive exams have a role to play in harming an applicant’s mental health?

‘Definitely’

“After two years of preparation, I started to feel depressed,” says Shakir S (name changed), a business student who prepared for various government exams, including the UPSC, for four years. “It was this realization that I had given two years of my life for this. There was loneliness too,” says Shakir, who was able to clear the written papers but fell short in interviews.

According to Pragati Goyal, a clinical psychologist at Lissun, a Gurugram-based mental health center, students preparing for these exams are more vulnerable to experiencing mental health problems. “A recent study showed that among those preparing for medical entrance exams, 72.2% experienced high levels of stress that interfered with their daily functioning. As health professionals, we are also seeing an increase in cases of depression and anxiety in students attributed to the competitive, rigorous and goal-oriented nature of these exams,” she says.

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Another problem is the high expectations students put on themselves. “In our practice, we have seen an increase in the number of students preparing for them who come to us with mental health issues. Common complaints include poor work efficiency, short attention span, and lack of concentration. However, these are not problems but are perceived as such. Students sometimes set unrealistic expectations and end up disappointed for not meeting them. It is not humanly possible for someone to study continuously and expect 100% efficiency at all times. Unfortunately, however, everyone is pursuing these unrealistic standards,” explains Goyal.

Lack of experience

Since such exams require one to study most of the day, it leaves little to no room for recreation. “There’s no room for it,” says Shakir. What is reserved, instead, is almost the same routine every day, the constant competition with peers, the fear of failure, the pressure of parents, along with a shred of hope of success, a hope that keeps you going. March.

“These kinds of preparations are tedious and time-consuming, and students often put everything else in their lives on hold to prepare for a test. And when the results are not in their favor, they have to go back to the same routine. It’s quite frustrating and most people feel like they’re stuck while the world moves on,” says Dr. Kapoor.

At the same time, Goyal highlights the failure to glorify being busy or continuously studying for hours, which makes students more vulnerable to mental health problems. “The human brain is not designed to work at such a fast pace, where there is almost no time to take a break,” she adds.

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Away from the family

Many training institutes based in Kota offer courses to students from the age of 10. Teenage students leave their hometowns and flock to this Rajasthan city in hopes of getting into India’s top engineering and medical colleges. Many stay away from their families and thus miss out on an important support system. Alone, they also have to micromanage all aspects of their lives.

“Mental health is built on multiple pillars, and one of the pillars is emotional support. It is the safety net that ensures the healthy growth of the mind and body”, says psychologist Goyal. “Since many students live away from home, they may not get the emotional support they want,” he adds.

copying mechanisms

Reeling under pressure, students develop all sorts of coping mechanisms, some helpful, some detrimental. For Shakir, it fell into the latter category and involved smoking and drinking, some things he had never done before he started preparing for these exams, he told FE. “Stress builds up over the years and after a certain time you start to feel lonely. You have no way to express yourself and you fall behind your peers so you just try to distract yourself,” he shares.

“Students with chronic stress often try to manage it with unhealthy behaviors, including binge drinking, gambling, overeating, compulsively engaging in sex, shopping or surfing the Internet, smoking, and drug use.” warns Dr. Kapoor.

tyranny of failure

“I went through hell,” Shakir says of how he felt after he decided not to go through with the exams. “More than anything, it was the social pressure, where everyone thought they had the right to ask about you, that hit me,” he says.

Lakhs of students sit for some of the most difficult exams in India, making the success rate extremely low. Take the case of UPSC. Approximately 10 lakh applicants appear for this exam every year, and only 1,000 or even fewer are successful. The rest fail.

“Unfortunately, we don’t set people up for failure. No one tells them that if A didn’t work, there can always be a plan B. There is so much investment in this exam, one day, that the tyranny of failure looms for a long time,” says Dr. Sudipto Chatterjee, a NIMHANS-trained Psychiatrist. “When they are exposed to failure, they are exposed to an enormous amount of stress, both physically and mentally.”

The problem is worse for those who start preparing for these types of exams at a very young age. “Nobody asks them if they really want to do this. No one informs them that the pyramid of success is really narrow at the top,” says Dr. Chatterjee. “All their lives, these little kids have known that their whole life depends on this one exam. There is no time for sports, extracurriculars, or socializing, which leaves no room for their personalities to grow,” he adds.

pushing too far

About 8.2% of students in India die by suicide, according to NCRB’s 2020 Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India (ADSI) report. Although there are multiple reasons behind this, the impact of academic pressure cannot be ruled out.

After scoring poorly in Class XII exams, an 18-year-old girl from Patna, who was preparing for IIT-JEE, allegedly committed suicide in Kota in July. A month earlier, 28-year-old Blesson Puddu Chako also took an extreme step after failing the UPSC exam, according to media reports. Every year, we come across such grim reports.

Tyranny of success?

Failing these exams hurts, but does success guarantee a life of prosperity and happiness? When the 2020 UPSC results were announced last year, a tweet from an IRS officer, who had passed the exam nearly two decades earlier, drew a lot of attention. “I got AIR 66 on the 2001 exam (and AIR 171 on the 2000 exam), and still ended up with #depression and #anxiety disorder. There is life, and then there is life. Just do your best, after all, we only have one life, this life,” wrote IRS officer Shubhrata Prakash.

As many as 122 students from IITs, IIMs, central universities and other centrally funded higher education institutions allegedly committed suicide between 2014 and 2021, the Lok Sabha was told earlier this year. Not only that, 85% of students surveyed by Insight student magazine said that mental health issues were common at IIT-Bombay. About 71% of the 450 students surveyed said the reason was academic pressure.

What is the way out?

Here are some mental health tips for students preparing for high pressure exams.

• Develop a schedule that helps your body and mind function better
• When studying, take short breaks and rejuvenate. Just 5 to 20 minutes of rest after every 1 to 2 hours can recharge your body
• Eat healthy food and get a good night’s sleep for at least 7-8 hours daily.
• Long study hours leave less time for physical activity. As a result, the body develops lethargy and the mind begins to respond negatively. Practice some physical activity
• Find a relaxation exercise that works for you. It can be just going for a walk
• Try to strike a balance
• Talk to your friends and family regularly for emotional support.
• Don’t set unrealistic expectations