Stress is the body's natural response that encourages individuals to cope with threats and challenges in their lives. It is a typical phenomenon that is present in every student but in addition to usual stressors, music students must also cope with stressors that coincide with the music profession, such as perfectionism, performance anxiety and career-related challenges. Apart from these, they also face the additional challenge of balancing their personal lives with their music-related activities. Each individual copes with stress in a different way and although stress can sometimes be helpful, it can have a detrimental effect on mental and physical health in the long term. The thesis at hand explores the concept of stress, its types, as well as the main life stressors and their effects. Understanding different types of stressors is important in order to be able to manage them, as they vary from individual to individual. After all, what seems a stressful situation to one individual, may not be necessarily a stressful to another. The response musicians experience in their body due to factors, such as performing, rehearsing (situational factors), low self-esteem (personality factors), perfectionism (motivational factors) and health problems (psychosocial factors), are based on anxiety and fear, which may lead to negative behaviour like substance abuse, rumination, as well as aggression, etc. All these limit the musician's ability to achieve his or her goals, the quality of the performance, as well as the productivity and creativity, and above all deprive the musician of the pleasure of playing. Our findings confirm that music students cope relatively well with stress-related issues. Several positive coping strategies have been introduced, such as breathing exercises, physical exercise, as well as spending time with family and friends. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of awareness concerning stress among music students, as stress levels are still very high. Most students are aware of stress yet they are unable to find the stressors causing it and to use adequate coping strategies to relieve it.
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