According to a 2013 study, it is said students spend an average of 2.5 hours a night on homework. Students have their sights set on achieving their own academic goals, but are pressured when school is always on their mind. Since 2000, almost 20% more students have said that high grades are a requirement to succeed in life. Academics can reach a point to be overwhelming to a student and cause burn out, or the physical or mental breakdown due to an overload of stress. Paired with competition to succeed among students, and the stress adds up for …show more content…
As PhD Noelle Leonard put it, students can put into a cycle of, “School, homework, extracurricular activities, sleep, repeat.” The cycle can really have an impact on students, leading to various unhealthy habits. One of the most popular means of coping with academic stress is substance use. Amidst all the external pressure to achieve good grades and succeed academically, students tend to turn to substance use to relieve their stress and find a temporary escape. The two most used substances for teen include alcohol and marijuana. Many cases reported that substance use usually did not increase as time went on, but there were a larger amount of cases of substance use reported. In more extreme cases, academic pressure has lead students to develop severe cases of anxiety or even depression. It is also noted that parents will go to fairly extreme lengths to keep their children in school to make sure they are able to keep their grades