I’ve seen many previously calm and resilient parents spiral out of control during college application season. They add 10 colleges to the list at the last minute, rewrite their kid’s essays, repeatedly call admissions offices on behalf of their kids, etc. This almost always does more harm than good, but it might help parents to recognize that their bodies are often doing what they’re trained to do, but at the wrong time.
As Dr. Amit Sood, a professor of medicine, explains in his book, The Mayo Clinic Guide to Stress-Free Living, the stressors that faced human beings as we evolved were real threats like predators. The only way we were able to survive was through our involuntary responses—our muscles would tense, our hearts would beat faster, and the blood would flow away from any system that wasn’t absolutely vital.
It turns out that today, our bodies sometimes misinterpret a stressful situation as an actual threat. That’s why your blood pressure can go through the roof when you learn that you have to throw a dinner party at the last minute, or that your seventeen-year-old just wrote a college essay about something that you’re sure won’t get him into Princeton.
I’m not qualified to tell anyone how to manage their stress (Dr. Sood is, and his book is excellent). But I can tell you that fight or flight responses to college application stress are almost never helpful. Yes, this process deserves to be taken seriously. And there are some mistakes, like forgetting to file an application on time, that really could cause some long-term regret.
But there is no such thing as a life-threatening college admissions situation, and no outcome that will remotely resemble a real tragedy. When you feel the stress start to make you do things that just don’t resemble your rational self, take some deep breaths, remind yourself that your body is just overreacting, and let your rational, developed, and threat-free brain take over.