Stress In Nursing Students During The 20th Century

During the 20th century, there was a vast raise in the dynamic transactional relationship between a person and their environment which has been viewed as stress, for that the stress was considered as the disease of the century (Evans & Kelly, 2004; Dahlin, Joneborg & Runeson, 2005).

Stress can be defined as the person’s reaction to an event in the world which he perceived as a probable threat (Thompson,1992; Evans, & Kelly, 2004; Day & Livingstone, 2004). The event or the stressor could be anything like environmental stressors, change in daily lifestyle, daily stress event, workplace stressors and social stressors. Academic work is considered as a stressor among students as indicated by Gunnings (1982) due to the nature of college life which
In addition to these typical stressors, the previous literatures has revealed that nursing students may be prone to more stressors than other students (Wong 2002, and Walton 2002) like lengthy hours of study, many assignments, insufficient free time, lack of timely feedback and lack of faculty response to student needs (Beck 1999, and Trockel 2000); experiencing uncertainty, fearfulness of making a mistake, lack of confidence, lack of healthy relationships with the instructors (Seyedfatemi et al., 2007; Sindir & Acaroglu, 2008; Shaban, Khater, & Akhu-Zaheya, 2012). Moreover, the nursing courses include clinical experiences, which are highly stressful due to unfamiliarity with clinical settings which were set up to be the most common sources of clinical stress (Seyedfatemi et al., 2007; Sindir& Acaroglu, 2008; Shaban, Khater, &Akhu-Zaheya, 2012) as well as the ward environment ( Hamill (1995); and the stress due to handling highly technical equipment (AL-barrak, 2008, Pulido-Martos, Augusto-Landa, & Lopez-Zafra, 2012) and preparing for the nursing licensure exam (Jimenez, et al., 2010; and Goff, 2011). Furthermore, the nursing students must perform their skills and procedures cautiously or they would cause serious harm to their patients, thus evoking their fear of making mistakes. Additionally, the studies pointed to the painful experiences of nursing students of being exposed to cases of death and dying, in addition to stress related to responsibility of caring for a sick person so early in the students' educational careers (Lees & Ellis,