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Wednesday, October 7, 2026

NEWS TODAY 07.10.2026

Pressure to perform weighs on medical students, 77% of those surveyed stressed

Anuja.Jaiswal@timesofindia.com 07.10.2026

New Delhi: The pressure to perform, fear of poor marks and the worry about not being able to answer teachers weigh heavily on the minds of medical students, 77% of whom have shown moderate to high stress in a New Delhi study. The study comes amid growing regulatory focus on student well-being.

In Aug, the National Medical Commission (NMC) directed medical colleges to comply with Supreme Court directions on reporting student suicides and unnatural deaths and maintain updated institutional records. Published in the Indian Heart Journal, the study assessed 406 MBBS students across all four years at a govt medical college in New Delhi.

Of them, 54.43% reported moderate stress and 22.66% high stress. The research involved teams from GB Pant Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research, Maulana Azad Medical College and IIIT-Delhi. “What was revealing was that more than three-fourths of the students had moderate-to-high stress. Asking a student whether they are stressed is not enough. We need to systematically assess stress and build strategies into medical education to help students deal with it,” said Dr Mohit Gupta, lead author of the study.

He added that a more inclusive, practical and balanced curriculum, with scope for recreation, could help reduce academic stress. The pressure to do well was the biggest source of stress. Students also reported worrying about not being able to answer teachers’ questions, poor marks and the vast coursework. Many said they felt their efforts were not recognised or that they were not good enough. The findings also echo recommendations of NMC’s national task force on mental health and well-being of medical students, which called for accessible counselling, crisis intervention, mental-health services and greater institutional support.

“We need to make our students intellectually strong, but we also need to make them emotionally stable. Our education system cannot focus only on academic achievement. We also need to create an environment where students can seek help, manage stress and remain emotionally resilient,” Gupta said.

Second-year students had the highest proportion of high stress, at 30.11%, though researchers said this could reflect differences between batches. Overall, heart-rate variability (HRV) did not differ significantly between students with mild, moderate and high stress. Final-year students had 29.1% lower RMSSD, an HRV measure, than second-year students after adjustment, but the pattern was inconsistent across years and does not show progressive changes in cardiac autonomic function.

The researchers said regular monitoring of student stress and structured institutional support are needed, particularly around academic and teaching-learning pressures. They also called for longer-term studies to understand how stress and cardiac autonomic measures change during medical education. The study was conducted between May and Nov 2025 among students aged 18-25 years. As a single-centre, cross-sectional study, it cannot establish causation or represent all medical students in India.

Tuesday, October 6, 2026

Employee faked sick leave for a Coorg trip, then manager sent the viral reel with five awkward words

etimes.in | Oct 1, 2026, 11.06 AM IST

A sick day can sometimes become the most complicated day off, especially when social media decides to join the story.

A Reddit user on r/antiLinkedIn shared how a planned Friday trip to Coorg turned into an awkward workplace episode. The employee claimed to have stomach flu while actually heading out for a holiday. The plan might have worked, except a holiday reel accidentally put the employee in the frame.

The sick leave excuse had one small problemAccording to the Reddit post, the employee took Friday off to travel to Coorg and told the manager that they had stomach flu.

There was no mention of the trip to the workplace. Instead, the employee went to a homestay and apparently ended up appearing in the background of a video featuring people dancing.

The unexpected part came later. The video reportedly took off on Instagram and crossed 13,000 likes.

That made a private holiday much less private.

Monday brought an awkward messageWhen the employee returned to work on Monday, the situation apparently became clear.

The Reddit user said their skip-level manager sent them the reel and wrote: “Hope your stomach is better.”

It was a short message, but the meaning was difficult to miss.

The employee said they were still employed after the incident, but claimed that their subsequent WFH requests were no longer being approved because the manager had lost trust in them.

The internet found the story painfully familiarThe post quickly attracted amused reactions from other Reddit users. Some laughed at the timing, while others pointed out the obvious risk of using a false excuse when social media can expose plans unexpectedly.

One commenter summed up the lesson bluntly: “Lies are short lived.”

Another joked about deleting Instagram altogether.

The original poster also appeared surprised by how quickly the story travelled, replying that they had not expected the reel to go viral.

A holiday can stay private, but a viral reel cannotThe interesting part of this story is not really the Coorg trip. Taking a day off is normal. The trouble came from giving a reason that did not match what happened.

A holiday photo shared with friends can remain buried in someone's feed. A reel that suddenly reaches thousands of people is a different matter.

And once a workplace connection sees it, explaining the coincidence can become harder than simply asking for a day off.

Social media has changed the old workplace ruleEarlier, an excuse given to a manager usually stayed between a few people. Today, a single tagged post can travel far beyond its original audience.

This Reddit story is a humorous example, not evidence that every workplace handles leave or WFH in the same way. Still, it captures an increasingly familiar workplace reality: online posts can sometimes reveal more than their creators intended

Disclaimer: This article is based on a Reddit post and comments shared by users. The claims and workplace circumstances described in the post have not been independently verified.