COLUMN: Support systems lessen stress of young adults

Today is the first Tuesday of October, which just serves as another reminder of how much closer I am to needing to have my life figured out.

I think that many people in my situation are feeling the same way. This past weekend, several of my peers took the LSAT, and the quickly approaching Nov. 1 date marks a popular submission deadline for internships and academic program admissions. For seniors especially, these benchmarks bring up the eye-rolling question of what they will be doing after college.

We up the ante for these questions when we mix in the anxiety factor. Anxiety has replaced depression as the leading mental health disorder for U.S. college students. The pressure is on.

Additionally, our generation reports the highest levels of stress with the least avenues of relief, as a recent American Psychological Association study found. Our work-life balance is out of whack, our constant connection to others can become suffocating and the question of, “Will this application lead to a job?” becomes more and more real each day.

Even for the most self-assured students, fall semester is a difficult time. It does something weird to our psyches. It leads us to dissecting every single decision we’ve made since stepping foot on campus, discussing life plans with equally distressed friends over Yogurtland and continually refreshing job listings on USC’s career website just to make sure no opportunity goes unnoticed.

“[Millennials] are at the beginning of their careers, which inherently creates stress, and the unpredictability of the job market adds another level of stress,” Jane Rheineck, an associate professor in the Department of Counseling at Northern Illinois University, told Counseling Today.

With a measurable amount of time until we enter the “real world,” we seniors are truly beginning to recognize that our time here at USC is finite.

When I asked my friends — all of whom are on Team Millennial with me — how they would describe their senior years, they all painted a similar high-pressure picture.

Isolating.

Suspenseful.

Cray.

Trying.

One friend even described his fall semester as a “crepe, not pancake” because it’s got him spread so thin.

We’re not alone.

Many of us are coming upon an end of an era; our institutional academic lives are coming to a close. This can have psychological effects, and the only way to treat them is to acknowledge that they exist.

Luckily, there’s an app for that. Just kidding — there might be one, but that’s not what’s going to assist a millennial in the weeks ahead. There’s something more old-school that helps.

Support systems are essential at this time. Tapping into support systems we have established over the course of college is one of the best solutions to tackling the psychological weights of senior year.

Support systems also help silence the doubts that rage in our heads. They’re particularly effective for millennials, who many scholars have concluded are dually individualistic and group-oriented.

Morley Winograd, a senior fellow at the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism who has studied millennials for the past decade, said young adults today are very concerned about how they can impact others.

Support systems come in many different forms. They’re parents, boyfriends and girlfriends, roommates and sometimes professionals. The University has made significant steps in increasing the support systems on campus. Early last month, the counseling center at the Engemann Student Health Center added six new full-time staff members.

Plus, when you identify people whom you can rely on, it becomes one less task you have come fall semester of senior year.

This is how we can fight off these feelings of isolation. In a world that constantly connects young adults through technology and social media, we frequently live through shared experiences. More often than not, we will be experiencing feelings at the same time. Thus, we can alleviate one another’s shared anxiety over our futures hanging in the balance.

Changing our mindset of how we approach the second half of this semester will help lead to better senior year experiences among those going through any form of uncertainty.

From what my support system has told me, apparently it does get better. We all just need to remember to reach out to them during this time of change.

After reading “Wait An L.A. Minute” on Tuesdays, join Jordyn Holman in her millennial conversations on Twitter @JordynJournals. She’s a senior studying print and digital journalism.