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Harvard is full of ducks.

Not the long-billed, webbed-footed birds, but the students who maintain a superficial aura of tranquility. Coined at Stanford University — but still very much applicable to Harvard — the term “Stanford Duck Syndrome” posits that while students appear to be as calm as a duck floating across a pond, under the surface they are paddling furiously to keep up with the competitive and rigorous college environment.

In my pre-orientation program sessions, meetings with my advisers, and conversations with my peers, I was often warned not to follow the duck calls prevalent at Harvard. Advice like joining only three clubs and taking a ‘manageable’ course load was supposed to keep me, and my peers, truly coasting along, instead of just pretending to.

But well-meaning advice is not enough to lessen the stress of college.

It’s difficult to avoid jumping headfirst into Harvard life and its pressure cooker environment. Many ducks want to just start paddling: doing summer comps for competitive clubs, or reading ahead for difficult classes.

In the first few weeks of classes, I dreadfully observed nearly the entire first-year cohort trying to demonstrate that they were Harvard material. Numerous students worked late nights to finish club presentations, others began the task of producing perfect problem sets, and everyone’s Google Calendars rapidly started filling up.

Unfortunately, plunging headfirst into the waterways of Harvard creates the perfect recipe for unmanageable stress.

Stress triggers a natural human reaction. When one encounters stressful stimuli, their amygdala, the emotional center of their brain, signals the hypothalamus, their body’s control center, to release the hormone adrenaline. This circulating adrenaline causes one’s heart to beat faster and one to breathe harder, ultimately putting them in a heightened state of alertness and energy. Subsequently, the hormone cortisol is released, ensuring that this response is sustained as long as the stress threat continues to exist.

But experiencing the stress response for too long can lead to health problems, such as anxiety, higher blood pressure, heart issues, obesity, depression, and diabetes.

Yet some students thrive — or at least claim to thrive — under high stress. This short-term, productive “eustress” takes advantage of the body’s fight-or-flight response to energize and motivate, helping people focus before exams or pushing them to challenge themselves academically and in extracurriculars.

Stress can manifest as positive eustress or its negative cousin distress depending on the person. Situations that are exciting for some students can be disastrous for others. This explains why some ducks are happy to swim intensely, while others float passively: Your stress response is based on your perception of the situation.

Take the ubiquitously employed art of procrastination. While some students, myself included, find delaying work to be unnecessarily stressful, others routinely procrastinate, following the philosophy that a paper due at 11:59 p.m. really only needs to be started at 10 p.m — perhaps even chugging caffeine or shifting their sleep cycle to meet such late-night deadlines.

Procrastination is an interesting biological phenomenon resulting from a conflict between the limbic system, responsible for our quick emotional responses, and the prefrontal cortex, responsible for complex decision-making. The limbic system can short-circuit the prefrontal cortex’s rational decision-making to drive one to push off unenjoyable work.

At its core, procrastination is employed to avoid the distress of work, but this behavior can actually be maladaptive. Eventually, one will need to complete their delayed task, at which time they may become incredibly stressed. A well-established study from 1997 even demonstrated that while students who habitually procrastinated were initially less stressed, by the end of the semester, they were more stressed, and overall they performed worse than their non-procrastinating peers.

It may be difficult to cut the habit of procrastination. Many students believe that they perform well only when they are pressurized and taking advantage of motivating eustress. But this belief blinds them to the potential deleterious consequences of later distress.

Being aware of stress in your daily life can help you live happier and healthier. While it may be difficult to distinguish between eu- and distress initially, a positive mindset can help you better deal with stressors in your daily life and harness the power of eustress without falling prey to distress.

Any discussion of college stress would be incomplete without mentioning the resources available to help students deal with high-intensity college environments’ negative consequences on mental health. A recent uptick in suicidal ideation among college students indicates the growing need to help students better manage stress in its associations to mental illness. Utilizing college and peer counseling may be a good start, but these systems require reforms — some of which are outlined in my peer’s column “Demystifying Therapy.”

As you move through Harvard, take a moment to slow down and think about the things that, as Marie Kondo would put it, “spark joy” for you. Instead of focusing on the ripples made by the ducks around you, it is important to focus on doing your best — even if that’s floating instead of paddling. Amongst a raft of ducks, sometimes it’s best to be a goose!

Sandhya Kumar ’26 lives in Greenough Hall. Her column, “Science ‘n Tradition,” runs on alternate Tuesdays.

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