Abstract

Students are always required to have good self-esteem. Still, psychological problems, such as excessive anxiety, will cause discomfort and distress, avoid social situations, and interfere with daily life, made them feel worthless. The purpose of the study was to determine the effect of self-esteem on anxiety through life skills training. The research subjects were 14 students divided into two groups, namely the experimental group and the control group. The measurement uses a self-esteem scale and an anxiety scale. Data analysis used non-parametric analysis, namely Mann Whitney, Wilcoxon, and Spearman’s Rank Correlation Test. The results of this study indicate a significant decrease in anxiety with increased self-esteem using life skills training for students.

Introduction

The spread of Covid-19 causes various psychological problems, one of which is anxiety in people in various countries [1,2]. Individuals who are affected by psychological problems, as many as 16% show symptoms of depression, 29% experience anxiety, and 8% experience stress [3].

Anxiety is a problem that most often occurs in students compared to the general population [4,5]. Students experiencing anxiety tend to be more common in women compared to men [4,6].

Anxiety is directly related to emotions and impacts a person’s way of thinking to physical problems. The symptoms of anxiety are excessive tension, unnatural sweating, tense muscles, and excessive restlessness [7,8]. Anxiety is followed by three or more symptoms of restlessness, feeling depressed, easily tired, difficulty concentrating, irritability, muscle tension, disturbed sleep, and irritability [9].

The impact caused by anxiety can be in the form of physical, affective, and cognitive changes [10,11]. Cognitively the impact can be in the form of changes in perception to the existence of cognitive processes that are relevant to avoiding the dangers felt by individuals with anxiety [12]. Someone with anxiety often experiences worry and uncontrollable about an event that happened in the past or will happen in the future, they experience excessive worry about their performance [13]. While the consequences that occur in students who experience anxiety are difficulties in making decisions, including choosing the desired career, in addition to the emergence of problems in education until they are expelled from the lecture bench [14].

Conclusion

Based on the research that has been done, it can be concluded that there is a decrease in anxiety due to increased self-esteem by using life skills training for students. Giving life skills training can increase self-esteem in students so that the anxiety felt by students decreases. In addition, the development of training methods or psychological interventions does not always have to look young but can also be done online with certain applications. The world of education, such as universities, can also apply this program to prepare students to face various problems, especially the Covid-19 pandemic.