Therapy For University of Michigan Students
When "The Best Years of Your Life" Don't Feel That Way
College stress isn't a sign you're failing. Most of the time it's a nervous system doing exactly what it's built to do under a huge change.
There's a certain kind of quiet that settles in around 1 a.m. in a dorm room. The laptop is open. Three assignments haven't been started. Down the hall someone is laughing, and your phone keeps showing you everyone else apparently having the semester of their lives. You told your mom you were fine yesterday. You're not sure that was true.
If you're reading this, some version of that scene probably lands. Maybe it isn't a dorm. Maybe it's your apartment, or your childhood bedroom on a telehealth day, or the library at an hour the library should be closed. The feeling underneath it is the same. Everyone else seems to be managing something you can't quite get your arms around.
I want to say something to that feeling before we go any further.
You are not the exception
I've been doing this work for more than twenty-five years, a good deal of it with University of Michigan students and young adults. The story almost everyone walks in with is some version of I'm the only one struggling like this. It's a convincing story. It's also, plainly, not true.
Source: American College Health Association, Fall 2024.
Those numbers come from a survey of more than 30,000 students (American College Health Association, Fall 2024). I don’t share them to label you with a diagnosis. I share them because the math matters. When you're sitting in a lecture hall of two hundred people, certain you're the one falling apart, the honest read of that room is that you're surrounded by people carrying the same weight, each of them just as sure they're alone in it. The isolation isn't a fact about you. It's how stress works. It whispers that you're the only one.
What's actually happening to you
Here's the reframe I offer students most often, and it tends to land. What you're calling not coping is usually a nervous system responding correctly to a huge change.
Think about what's being asked of you. In a few months you've been relocated, separated from most of the people who knew you, handed full authority over your sleep, your food, your money, your time, and your future, and told this is supposed to be fun. That isn't a small adjustment you should breeze through. It's one of the largest identity shifts a person goes through, and your body knows it.
“Stress isn’t proof that something is wrong with you. It’s proof that you’re doing something hard. Those are two different things, and the difference is the whole game.”
The part nobody tells you to protect
If there's one finding from the research I'd want you to actually use, it's this. Connection isn't a luxury you earn once you've handled everything else. It's the thing that makes handling everything else possible.
A large body of work on what psychologists call the stress-buffering effect finds that college students who feel genuinely supported, who have people they can be themselves in front of, show meaningfully lower rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness, even under the same pressures as everyone else (systematic review on social support and student mental health, 2025; study on social connection and student wellbeing, 2025). The pressure doesn't vanish. What changes is whether you carry it alone.
This is worth naming, because stress talks you out of the one thing that would help. It tells you to cancel, to stay in, to stop answering texts until you've got it together. Notice that instinct, and when you can, do the opposite of what it says. Not a whole social overhaul. One person. One real conversation where you don't perform being fine.
Small things, and why they're not small
When students ask me what actually helps, they're often braced for something huge. It's usually the opposite.
The research on lowering stress in college students keeps pointing to plain, learnable practices. Structured mindfulness programs, across several analyses of university students, show real drops in anxiety, stress, and depression (meta-analyses of mindfulness-based programs for university students, 2023). You don't have to become someone who meditates on a mountain. It means the boring and small steps carry the weight. Sleep you protect instead of trade away. Some movement. A few minutes where nothing is asked of you. Permission to not have your whole life figured out by finals.
In my work I talk about pacing. Knowing when to keep your foot on the gas, and when the wiser move is the brake. A lot of what looks like a stress problem is really a pacing problem. Racing through each day, every day, never works well.
When it's more than a hard week
Some stress is just the weather of a demanding chapter, and it passes. There's another version that stops passing. The sleep won't come back. Things you used to enjoy go flat. The 1 a.m. quiet starts to feel less like overwhelm and more like something you can't climb out of. If that's closer to where you are, read this next line as plainly as I mean it. That isn't you being dramatic, and it isn't something you have to wait to get bad enough before you take it seriously.
Talking to someone isn't an admission that you failed at being a student. In my experience it's often the most clear-eyed thing a young person does all year. It will help build the same skills that you’ll use for every transition after this one.
If any of this sounds like your own life, reach out to chat.
I work with students in person here in Denver's Cherry Creek neighborhood, and by telehealth across Colorado, Michigan, and Illinois, including a lot of University of Michigan students. Recognizing yourself in this is enough to start; figuring it out together is the work.
