"Everyone finish up your last few sentences quickly," the chief examiner declared loudly. His deep voice reverberated in the small classroom. As I looked up, to my horror, I saw that I had less than 5 minutes to finish up the last 3 paragraphs. My mind was sent into a tizzy. Sweat started cascading down the side of my head as my thoughts went into a frenzy. Soon enough, my hands started shivering as I tried my best to get a grip on myself and finish my essay but sadly, luck was not on my side. The examiner snatched the papers from my hands before I could even sign off. At that moment, the need to finish the paper caused me to stress myself out. Stress is unavoidable and it is not possible to eliminate it from our lives entirely. For me, I get stressed out when faced with immense pressure to complete a task at hand. Stress comes about due to many things such as the need to fulfil desired expectations, the hassle of meeting deadlines and financial burdens.
Firstly, Stress comes about due to the need to fulfil desired expectations imposed upon us by others. In Singapore, Singaporean teenagers are often left feeling stressed about achieving academic excellence. In addition, Singaporean parents tend to value education a lot as it allows one to succeed in our fast-paced world thus they see the immense need for their children to acquire good results in their examinations. This expectation by parents causes the teenagers to be burdened by immense pressure from parents as well school. It is often seen that Singaporean teenagers get weighed down by the colossal amount of expectations that they start feeling like giving up when they come face to face with failure. Failure causes them to start hating themselves as they think that they are incompetent and this is made worse by parents who nag at them incessantly to perform better. This leads to tremendous stress being built over time which has a heavy toll on teenagers.
