Exam Stress

Exams are stressful no matter what age you are – and if you’re a parent, just as stressful for you as for your teenager or university student offspring.

How do you cope with pre-exam nerves in your family? How can you help your teen cope better?

It’s what you know..

I’m thinking it may be a bit late in the day if your strategy involves lots of learning and revision – it’s exam season now, after all. We’ll have to take it as a given that as much actual learning as is likely to take place has taken place.

Strategy

The exam day strategy has been addressed: to pass an exam you need to get marks – the marks are all equal and getting as many of them as possible is the aim.

Sounds obvious, right? – but perhaps as simple as checking you know how many points are on offer and allowing a certain amount of time per mark could be a strategy? Going for the simple marks first another strategy. Hopefully such strategies are discussed in school. If your teenager is anything like mine then this information may not be forthcoming.

Perhaps the one most overlooked – the effect of a stressed mind versus that of a relaxed mind. Being in panic mode is never going to give you the best result. How about entering the exam hall with a beautifully relax and ready-to-go mindset?

Mindset

It is a well-known fact that a positive mindset yields positive results. Repeating mantras such as ‘all will be well’, ‘I will do my best on the day’ are all very well – but unless the sub-conscious mind fully embraces the optimism not much will happen!

The ability to reach a state of calm – actually a state of flow – where the mind is able to bring forward with ease all that inner knowledge and leave the stress to one side: how would it feel to have that level of non-stress?

Meditation

Meditation is the key. Perhaps a skill that should be taught in schools – but how likely is that? A skill that perhaps many teenagers are not willing to embrace – despite the evidence that meditating provides such overwhelming good results and is routinely done by many, if not most, high level business pioneers? Perhaps the key is to lead by example. Where the ethos at home is a state of calm and meditation part of life – perhaps from there we can truly help to reduce exam stress?