CUNE Counseling Services Present TikTok Your Stress
by Hannah Birtell
Concordia’s counseling services offered an event called “TikTok Your Stress: Understanding My Own Response to Life Stressors” to help students better handle stress.
On Thursday, September 3, Director of Counseling Kathleen von Kampen and Adjunct Prof. and Counselor Kim Boyce presented on how there are good and bad kinds of stress and how to cope with it. The name for the event came from the popular video sharing platform, TikTok and how people in the videos deal with their stress.
“We were trying to figure out something that would be socially cool and captivating and so we were gonna do a TikTok video of people that were managing their stress well and people who weren’t,” Boyce said.
Besides defining what anxiety is, von Kampen and Boyce explained that the frequency, intensity and duration of anxiety determines whether it is healthy or unhealthy for you. When students are dealing with stress and anxiety, they can use coping techniques such as grounding their senses, deep breathing and challenging the irrational thoughts that tend to come with anxiety.
“Coping skills are always good to have, doesn’t matter when or where or why,” von Kampen said.
Both von Kampen and Boyce have both seen a rise in student stress levels this semester and hoped that this event could help some students learn how to better manage their stress.
“College is the 5th most stressful experience we are going to have in life so we are already stressed as college students,” Boyce said. “College students are stressed because they are kinda supposed to be, but this year in particular, this is extra, so unprecedented and if people aren’t prepared then they are going to get knocked down by this storm.”
Von Kampen and Boyce hope to continue to offer events like “TikTok Your Stress” that would cover topics such as stress and depression and provide tools for students to use in their day to day lives to help stay mentally healthy.
“Stress, anxiety, depression, kind of anything that equips students to manage the regular day-to-day things on top of the extra stressors that we have in life right now is going to be useful,” von Kampen said.
