Stress Management Workshop for College Students

Reviewed by Greg Wilson / 2023-03-27
Keywords: Stress

The further I get from my college years, the more I wonder how I got through them. It wasn't just the stress of juggling assignments that all seemed to be due on Thursday while figuring out what it meant to be an independent adult; the worst part was not being able to admit that it was overwhelming because you knew the response would be, "If you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen (or lab)."

A lot has changed for the better since then, in part because of research like that reported in this recent paper. Can a short online workshop on how to manage stress and anxiety actually help students deal with those issues? The answer isn't obvious: on the one hand, it ought to, but on the other hand, does help have to be delivered in person to be effective? Or is a longer intervention required? The answers seem to be "no" and "no", which immediately makes me wonder whether something like this would help programmers (and others) who are dealing with similar stress at work.

As a bonus, this paper shows how scientific abstracts should be written. As I wrote last year, the abstracts of most research papers in software engineering are more like movie trailers; while that is starting to change, it's still refreshing to see objectives, methods, results, and conclusions laid out succinctly and without fluff.

Carol S. Lee, Margaret Bowman, and Jenny L. Wu. Preliminary outcomes from a single-session, asynchronous online, stress and anxiety management workshop for college students. Trends in Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, 2022. doi:10.47626/2237-6089-2021-0448.

Objective: Self-guided asynchronous online interventions may provide college students access to evidence-based care, while mitigating barriers like limited hours of service. Thus, we examined the preliminary effectiveness of a 45-minute self-guided, asynchronous online, Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT)-informed stress and anxiety management workshop. Participants: College undergraduates (N=131) were randomized to either workshop (n=65) or waitlist control (n=66) conditions. Methods: Participants in the workshop condition completed baseline measures of depression, stress, and anxiety, before completing the workshop. Participants in the waitlist control condition only completed the baseline measures. All participants were reassessed at one-week follow-up. Results: Controlling for baseline measures, students in the workshop condition experienced significantly less stress and greater self-efficacy to regulate stress and anxiety at follow-up, compared to waitlist controls. Conclusions: A 45-minute self-guided, asynchronous online, DBT Skills-informed stress and anxiety management workshop may reduce stress and self-efficacy to regulate stress and anxiety.