Why Are Students So Unhealthy during Finals Week?

It's that time of the year: the trees are all bare, a coat of frost shines on the sidewalk, the smell of  anxietys hangs in the air, and sleep-deprived students lumber around campus unshowered and unshaven. Ah, finals season!

Most of us intuitively understand that stress is connected to students' failure to fulfill even the most basic self-care during finals, but why? After all, students usually don't have class or other commitments during finals week, so they should be able to focus exclusively on studying without ignoring the basics like brushing their teeth and getting enough to eat.

Indeed, one might think that faced with the intense pressure of finals, students would renew their focus and effort. In fact, research suggests otherwise, demonstrating how stress alters the way we make decisions.

When stressed out we tend to focus on short-term rewards and pleasurable outcomes of a decision while ignoring the less savory and long-term consequences. That's why it's so hard to resist eating that pint of ice cream in your freezer after a tough day or to forgo buying that new pair of shoes you covet but can't afford after a miserable meeting at the office.

In other words, it is exactly because students have to study for five finals that a friend's invitation to party tempts them so much. The stress causes them to focus on the immediate reward of going to the party (socializing and drinking) and not the downside of losing a night's sleep to late night carousing (hang over and poor grades).

Stress also makes it more difficult for students to connect bad decisions to their consequences. Even if students go out the night before a test, stress will help them remember the pleasurable experience of socializing and drinking and forget the fact that they were horribly hung over for the exam. This is one reason why researchers also link stress to substance abuse and addiction. Under stress, you focus on the pleasures of the drug and lose sight of the negative consequences.

Am I saying that stress makes us short-sighted and irresponsible? Not quite. Another recent study shows that under stress some people are actually more likely to sacrifice their time to help someone they care about. The research supports the uplifting hypothesis that humankind's default setting is to self-sacrifice (when it comes to close relationships). This is well and good for our species, but it also explains why some harried students take on big social commitments during finals week when they should be making more time for themselves.

All this rather paradoxically suggests that exactly when we need to buckle down and get the most done, we have the fewest cognitive resources to do so because stress saps our willpower. Given this fact, a nudge in the right direction might help students keep their cool and improve their grades.

A few common tips worth reminding students about:

Exercise (like walking) has long been touted as an important stress reliever and memory aid. Recent studies suggest that regular exercise also boosts creativity.

Mindfulness and meditation are also good ways to decompress and still the turbulent waters of daily life.

Also remind students to wait until after finals to make big decisions. The simple act of waiting can help students make better, more reflective choices.

What Happens in College Doesn't Always Stay in College

Photograph courtesy of Amanda Berg

While a junior at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Amanda Berg noticed her female friends trying to match men drink for drink at parties. The trend bothered her and she was interested in exploring it further. So on Halloween, Berg decided to bring her camera to a party, and instead of knocking back drinks, she snapped photos.

The one-night experiment developed into a long-term project, and Berg continued to document her female friends while they partied. The fruit of this project, Berg's photo-essay, "Keg Stand Queens: Binge Drinking among College-Aged Women," explores "the complex relationship women undergraduates have with alcohol." 

Berg has plenty of images of binge drinking that we might expect from a photo-essay on college partying: students shotgunning beers, another chugging from a bottle of booze as she flips off the cheering crowd encircling her, and a young woman throwing up in the bathroom after partying too hard.

Other photos show the way drinking insinuates itself into the more mundane aspects of student life like one photograph of a half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels on a bathroom counter, nestled among makeup, toothpaste, and combs.

In some ways, it is this last photo that is the most troubling. It suggests the way drinking becomes as routine as brushing your teeth or combing your hair. Indeed, harm-prevention programs usually educate students about the dangers of binge drinking, but rarely do they mention the dangers of daily drinking.

 

The Importance of Weekly Limits

The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) defines moderate drinking by both daily and weekly limits. For men, those limits are no more than four drinks a day or 14 drinks in a week. For women, it's three drinks a day or seven drinks in a week. Daily limits protect people from acute risks such as alcohol poisoning. Weekly limits, meanwhile, protect them from long-term risks associated with alcohol such as certain types of cancer.

While alcohol programs generally educate students about daily limits and the dangers of binge drinking, most don't mention weekly limits, even though keeping within both limits is important to students' health.

In a recent study published in Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, Bettina Hoeppner and her colleagues found that 50% of college women and 45% of college men exceeded the NIAAA's weekly limits at least once in their first year of college. The findings reveal a hole in some campuses harm-reduction efforts. By failing to educate students about weekly limits, Hoeppner argues, schools may be missing an important chance to have a long-term impact on students' lives, especially young women.

In fact, recent data show that while young adults binge less after college graduation, they continue to drink just as frequently if not more. "[T]his raises the possibility," Hoeppner speculates, "that the weekly limits become more relevant after leaving the college environment when weekly volume is less likely to be driven by heavy episodic drinking."

Breaking the cycle

College students are still more likely to exceed daily than weekly limits. Indeed, according to Hoeppner's data, almost no students exceeded weekly limits without also exceeding daily limits. Furthermore, the risks of binge drinking (blackouts, injuries, alcohol poisoning) are more acute than the potential long-term effects of regularly exceeding weekly limits. But, as Hoeppner's research suggests, students also need to think about how their drinking fits into a bigger picture.

Just as colleges and universities educate students for professional life after graduation, schools need to consider how their harm-reduction strategies promote healthier lifestyles at college and beyond.
Telling students that alcohol abuse is just a "college" problem reinforces the perception that there aren't long-term consequences to their behavior: "What happens at college stays at college."

Failing to warn students about the long-term consequences of heavy drinking not only lets women down, it lets all students down. Education programs prepare students for life, not just college.

The final image in Berg's photo-essay is a young girl practicing flip cup. She is surrounded by the detritus of a wedding celebration. Empty cups and containers are strewn across the table. In the distance, just out of focus, lies a discarded silver sandal. As Berg told Slate Magazine, "It seems like the end is the beginning, and it just goes on."

 

Works Cited

Hoeppner, B.B., Paskausky, A.L., Jackson, K.M., Barnett, N.P. (2013) "Sex Differences in College Student Adherence to NIAAA Drinking Guidelines," Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 37, 1779-1786.

Court Rejects Ban on Alcohol Advertising in College Papers

Until the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit's recent decision limited its reach, the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Board's (ABC) regulations banned all college newspapers from running alcohol advertising. The ban is part of a comprehensive strategy aimed at reducing underage drinking.

Many colleges and universities take a similar "environmental" or "community-level" approach to combat high-risk drinking. These interventions often enlist retailers and advertisers as allies in prevention efforts. 

But in 2006 two college newspapers affected by the regulation, The University of Virginia's Cavalier Daily and Virginia Tech's Collegiate Daily, sued the ABC, claiming the ban violated their First Amendment free speech rights.

The newspapers pointed out that a majority of their readership were over 21 (59-60% of the Collegiate Times' and 64% of The Cavalier Daily's readers). Therefore, while Virginia had a government interest in preventing underage drinking, the papers' wide distribution to people over 21 meant that the scope of the regulation was too broad.

In its decision, the Court sided with the college newspapers, acknowledging the state's interest but rejecting the regulation's overbroad reach.

"While commercial speech is protected by the First Amendment, there is a 'commonsense distinction' between commercial speech and other varieties of speech...[therefore] a regulation of commercial speech will be upheld if (1) the regulated speech concerns lawful activity and is not misleading; (2) the regulation is supported by a substantial government interest; (3) the regulation directly advances that interest; and (4) the regulation is not more extensive than necessary to serve the government’s interest."

Under this analysis, the Court concluded, "the challenged regulation fails...because it prohibits large numbers of adults who are 21 years of age or older from receiving truthful information about a product that they are legally allowed to consume...Accordingly, the challenged regulation is unconstitutionally overbroad."

The court also rejected the ABC's rejoinder that the regulation was justified by the state's more general interest in combatting abusive drinking, whether by underage or of-age drinkers. The Court cited a previous case that determined "states may not 'seek to remove a popular but disfavored product from the marketplace by prohibiting truthful, non-misleading advertisements.'"

The ruling, however, did not overturn the regulation itself. It only rejected the regulation as applied to these four-year college newspapers. As commentators have pointed out, where a paper's underage readership is the majority of its readership, the ban might still apply. A paper at two-year college, for instance, might still be subject to the regulation.

Critics of the ban have lauded the decision as a victory for free speech. Indeed, because school papers operate under tight budgets, the ban had a significant impact on the papers' finances and thus affected their primary mission of news reporting. According to estimates in The Cavalier Daily, lifting the prohibition would raise advertising revenue by 5 to 8%.

And while harm-reduction specialists may lament the loss of another valuable tool, the research is still divided on the effects of advertising on alcohol consumption.