At times everyone has stress. In an ideal world we would avoid any stress in our life. but the honest answer is that everyone undergoes stress and we need some of them.
We perform better during difficult times when we have a reason to be doing our best. Think about that subject where you knew the exam would be difficult because of the huge amount of information you had to learn. There are two ways you can succeed at it. You either start really early learning and manage to get through it that way or you happen to be procrastinating. In the last situation you will be successfull by the stress you have that you need to pass the exam.
Its not stress that kills us, it is our reaction to it. – Hans Selye
Despite that stress can be helpfull in certain situations at the same moment it can have a negative effect. Consider preparing for a presentation, a lot of people drive themselves crazy when they have to give a presentation in front of their class. But why do we do this? The main reason for it is we are putting the stress on ourselves because of previous performances. When you know this you can prepare yourself and reduce the stress you will have. The first step is know what you will be talking about and don’t just learn by hart the words you were going to use. Expand your knowledge on the topic further than just the specific topic at hand. Once you know more about it you will be more comfortable talking about it. You will not just be doing a presentation anymore but be talking about a subject that others don’t know everything about.
It is not the stress itself that is the problem but how you deal with it. If we look at the presentation example you can either continue to stress yourself out or you can realise that it is not needed to stress. To prevent of building too much stress when standing there prepare yourself by adding the stress factor during your preparation. This can be achieved by asking friends or family to listen to you doing the presentation. If you are able to imagine very well even just thinking about the stressfull situation can add the edge on the preparation. It will prepare you in similar circumstances.