Does it feel as if the grip is tightening and you are ready to explode? Do you feel the pressure?

You are not alone. Just when you think that everything is under control, then the world has just become chaotic. The bombs start to drop over Baghdad, midterms begin, you have just discovered that the relationship you are in is not going anywhere or that job is just about to make you go insane.

It’s that time of the semester.

Just take a look around campus. Everyone seems to be rushing around, trying to finish that paper, or turn in that last-minute application. Look in the library. Lines to the computer lab wrap around the corner by mid-morning.

Pity those poor, clueless freshmen who are just now figuring out how to manage their schedules. And how about those graduating seniors who will do anything to keep from jeopardizing their graduation plans?

Stress is nothing new. A study conducted at University of California, Los Angeles found that 30 percent of freshmen and 38 percent of all women students feel overwhelmed most of the time. An estimated 70 percent to 90 percent of visits to primary care physicians are for stress-related problems.

The problems associated with stress do not reside, however, in the occasional job interview or the exam that you need to cram for. When stress becomes unhealthy is when it turns into distress, which eventually leads to illness.

We are taught in our society that by being busy, we are being productive. This is not always true. By making ourselves busy, we forget to enjoy the simple things that life has to offer. When we take on too much, we actually become counter-productive because our energies are spread too thin.

Before you explode from this mounting pressure, just think: spring break is less than a week away. You have worked hard this whole semester, so next week will be the time to do something for yourself. Although spring break won’t make you forget the war that is being fought on the other side of the world, it will be a much-needed escape from the pressures that society puts on us–or we put upon ourselves–in this fast-paced country.

We’re good at escaping, right? When things in life bother us, we just tune it out with our favorite CD or by adding another activity to our schedule. We have no problem tuning out the war. Many of us will still go on our Spring Break trips, caught up in a blur of sex and alcohol, without a care in the world.

This is how many college students spend their spring breaks. That is fine, if you are willing to risk contracting an STD or end up in a hospital for alcohol poisoning.

What bothers me, though, is how removed many are from the reality of life and the events going on in the world around us. I bet that Spring Break plans don’t even cross the mind of the college-aged student living in Iraq.

So, with this in mind, how do we go about our daily lives? How do we relax in a time when we physically and emotionally need to be stress-free, but we know that our country and our troops are potentially in danger? That people are suffering?

It’s hard to know how to act. The world has changed, but that course syllabus didn’t change after the war started.

So for now, we muddle along and wait for Spring Break, finals, the end of the semester. And maybe we feel a twinge of guilt for feeling stressed when, really, things could be a lot worse.

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