Stressed and Stuck: How Can We Motivate Students to Use Effective Coping Strategies?

Abstract

University students face high levels of stress and are not using adaptive coping strategies. We conducted a pilot study with 28 MacEwan University students to investigate student barriers to coping and what coping strategies they use. Almost half of our sample reported that they only sometimes try to cope with stress and many were not engaging in adaptive and effective coping techniques. The main barriers to coping that students reported were that they often forget to use coping strategies in the moment, are unaware they exist, they have not worked in the past, they have not been taught how to use them effectively, and they lack motivation and time to use them. Our study is designed to address these barriers by educating students about two fast and effective coping techniques (i.e., deep breathing and cognitive reappraisal) and using biofeedback to show the effectiveness of the techniques and increase their salience to make them memorable. Participants in the education groups performed a stress induction task before learning one of the two coping methods. Participants in the biofeedback groups also had their heart rate and blood pressure measured before and after engaging in the coping technique they learned. Pilot results indicate that the stress task was not effective at inducing stress. Preliminary evidence suggests that both deep breathing and cognitive reappraisal effectively reduce biofeedback markers. In the future, we will investigate whether a growth mindset, education, and biofeedback lead to increased use of the learned coping technique in the future. 

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Michele Moscicki