One gets the first bitter taste of stress in the adolescent years. There is pressure to perform well in exams, an anxiety whether one will be accepted by peers and to add to it all, differences in generations cause many arguments. All these lead to stress in susceptible youngsters. It is important to deal with stress at this stage because it lays foundations of the mental make-up of the individual for the years to come.

EXAM ANXIETY
The most common form of student stress is exam anxiety. Marked by a feeling of panic, initial symptoms of exam anxiety are:
• Increased perspiration (seen as sweaty palms)
• Rapid heart beating
• Upset stomach
• Tense muscles
• Headache

However, when full-blown distress sets in, then the following symptoms are observed:
• Inability to focus and understand the questions
• Difficulty in organizing thought
• Difficulty in retrieving key words and concepts
• A 'blank feeling' when one tries to remember the answers
• Remembering the answers after the exam is over
• The unfortunate result of excess exam stress is that the student fares badly in exams in spite of having worked hard.

Exam stress in students has greatly increased over the last few decades. The primary reason for this is that parents and teachers expect students to perform excessively well in their exams. Earlier, only students preparing for important board exams (for e.g. 10th and 12th standards) would experience maximum exam stress. But clinical experience has shown that today, even 8th standard students start experiencing exam stress, which continues to the time the they obtain admission into professional colleges of their choice. Sometimes, the stress spills over into college life as well as after that in the guise of work stress. It will not be fair to blame the teachers or the parents who put pressure on the students, which leads to exam anxiety. In an era of increasing competition, the child has to work harder to qualify for the best college or professional institution.

The other common stressors faced by a student are:
• Failure in examinations
• The first year of college, requiring adjustment to new study material and people
• Transfer to another college/ educational institution
• Economic burden of higher studies
• Problems with teachers
• Being expelled or having to quit college

At HHC, we believe that student stress is one of the most challenging segments of stress faced by medicine today. Students are exposed to stress at a very young age, with each generation being exposed earlier than the one preceding it. Therefore, it is not surprising to see that chronic diseases like hypertension, diabetes, ulcers, hair falling etc., which earlier would commonly occur after 40 years of age, have now started occurring far more frequently in the late 20s and the early 30s. This is a sad phenomenon because it means that even though medicine has been able to prolong life to an average life span of around 72 years, it has failed to improve the quality of life. To bring about a change, we first need to tackle stress at an early stage. It has become imperative to identify and deal effectively with student stress and to treat it before it causes irreversible damage to the mind and the body

TREATMENT OF STUDENT STRESS AT HHC
As explained earlier, exam anxiety, the most common form of student stress, is to some extent present in all of us, and up to a certain level works to motivate the student to study even harder. On the other hand there are increasing instances of exam anxiety ending up as a form of distress. In this state, students experience poor concentration, reduced attention span, and memory failure at the time of exams with most of these resolving after the exams are over. Since this form of distress spoils the performance of even the brightest of students, it becomes a matter of concern and requires treatment at the right point of time.

At HHC, we treat distress forms of exam anxiety through a group of specific homeopathic medications. These medications function by controlling and reducing the extent of exam anxieties as perceived by the human body. These in turn work by controlling stress levels and preventing symptoms of distress from setting in, thus giving the student a chance to perform at his/ her best potential. A further advantage of the treatment that homeopathy has no side effects, like drowsiness, insomnia or trembling, unlike conventional treatment