With exams only weeks away now, it is very common for people to experience some exam stress and in more severe cases Test Anxiety. Understanding it and knowing how to tackle it is very valuable. This is an evidence-based guide to dealing with Exam Stress.

Firstly, I want to distinguish between exam stress and test anxiety. Most of us at some point will have experienced exam stress, it might be caused by knowing an exam is particularly hard or knowing we need a high mark on that test. However, test anxiety is more severe. Although it is not recognised as a mental disorder it is often characterised as a type of performance anxiety which can lead to depression and other mental illnesses. In this post, I will be discussing tips for exam stress since it is something we all deal with. These tips are not for test anxiety, even though they may work, I don’t want to comment on how to deal with a mental disorder as someone who is not a trained professional.

Exam Stress Symptoms

Let’s begin with how to recognise if you are feeling some exam stress (or if someone you know has it). Here are the common exam stress symptoms according to the NHS

• Worrying a lot about exams
• Feeling Tense
• Headaches and Stomach Pains
• Poor Sleep
• Change in Eating Habits
• Becoming irritable
• Not enjoying activities you used to
• A negative mood about the future

These aren’t great feelings to have since they can have negative effects on your academic performance. Minimising them is key so we can perform at our best

Combating Symptoms

Managing exam stress can be tough, some symptoms are easier to fix than others. However, often fixing the easy ones will result in many of the others improving somewhat if not fixing them completely. Let’s begin tackling these symptoms with some exam stress management techniques

Get Better Sleep

You need at least 8 hours of sleep a night (this should be the case all the time but definitely during exam time). This means consciously scheduling in your sleep like it were a task. Often we may start the day slowly and then work into the night. Scheduling your revision is key to making sure you are done on time allowing you to have some relaxation time and lots of sleep. Also, avoid any activities that really work the brain half an hour before you go to bed. This includes activities like video games. Try and relax by reading or watching something light on TV. Here is some further research on the affect of lack of sleep in achedmic performance. If you are really interested in the importance of sleep you can read the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

Eat Better

Secondly eating habits, try and be conscious of eating healthy, this will help you sleep better, it will decrease tiredness felt after eating and can even make you think sharper. Take 30 minutes to an hour during the day to plan and have healthy food. This is also great to take your mind off studying which will help with how tense you feel and stop you worrying for at least a little while.

Be Aware of the symptoms

The other symptoms don’t really have their own advice, improving your eating and sleeping habits will have significantly improved them. The only advice I can give is to be aware of them, if you are reading this you have probably recognised you are feeling some exam stress and now recognise that you are experiencing some of the symptoms above. Simply knowing of the symptoms will mean that when you recognise you are showing them you will try to counteract them and they will slowly improve.

Plan

I briefly mentioned this earlier so let’s go into more detail. Having a detailed plan will help you stay on top of your work, it will give you the confidence to know that you have covered all the topics you need to thoroughly and it will make sure you have enough time for some important relaxing at the end of the day which will help keep you relaxed. It is important that your plan is feasible, it isn’t possible to do 16hr of revision a day so don’t even try. I recommend between 6-9 hours a day. If you want a guide to making a plan have a look at how to set up a retrospective revision timetable here.

Exercise

This can be as simple as getting out for a walk every couple of days, but exercising firstly helps keep you healthy because it produces endorphins which help with sleep. But it also provides a time for us to de-stress, repetitive exercise such as running or walking doesn’t require much brain power, but the act of exercise increases blood flow to the brain giving you more reasoning capacity which often helps destress. By thinking things through and reasoning the outcomes, you will often realise they aren’t as bad as they first seemed. You can read more about the importance of exercise here.

Regular Breaks

Giving yourself a break, even 5 minutes, just recollecting your thoughts can help with your productivity tremendously. This will also give you time to destress before starting another topic, preventing exam stress to build up. In these breaks avoid using your phone, it will just distract you and increase the length of the breaks and in the long run lead to more stress as you will have to work later or feel like you haven’t done as much revision as you wanted that day.

Finally

Remember everyone will feel stressed, being stressed just means you care about the outcome, so work hard. When you look back on an exam, if you have worked hard you will have gotten the best result you could and you won’t look back with regret.

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