How to chill out the day of the exam

For many of you, exam season has already begun or is on the cusp on becoming a reality. Finally, all those years, months and weeks you’ve been studying have led up to this moment. All that knowledge that you’ve acquired, all those facts that you’ve memorise, all those lessons that you have attended day in day out, are finally being put to use. Everyone reacts differently to exams but generally the agreed consensus is that exams are stressful. Thought the days leading up to an exam can be pretty nerve-wracking, sometimes you can find that the actual day of your exam, you are finding it particularly hard to concentrate. You feel like you are worrying so much that you can’t even focus on what you revised for because the impeding doom of the exams seems to overshadow your knowledge. We get it, it happens. But it doesn’t have to. Exams are pretty rubbish, but let’s not give them the power to kill our chill.

Here are some tips:

1) Eat a good, wholesome breakfast/meal before your exam. Working on an empty stomach is not a great idea. Exams are high pressure environments and adding hunger to that can make things slightly worse. The thought of your exams may make you feel a little sick, but having a good healthy breakfast (something as simple as porridge with bananas) or meal can really help sustain you during the exam and make sure you stay concentrated for longer.

2) Skim through pre-prepared notes. If it’s a morning exam, look over your revision notes but just specifically the bits you know that you struggle on – now isn’t really the time to be making new notes. Just skim through what you have and give yourself a rough overview of your revision notes. If it’s an afternoon or evening exam, you have more time to perhaps go over whole sections of your syllabus but don’t stretch yourself too much – you don’t want to go into your exam exhausted from the amount of revision you’d done just before it – it’s just a bit counter-intuitive.

3) Relax. It’s up to you whether you want to revise and review until the last second, but if you know that you are prone to getting quite anxious or stressed before an exam, try to relax at least 30 minutes before. Clear your head, visualise how you’d like the exam to go, lie down and just relax. This can help because you won’t have rushing revision notes in your head as soon as you walk into your exam.

When you walk into your exam relaxed, you’re basically already winning.

4) Choose to either connect or disconnect. Sometimes our greatest bearers of stress for exams can be our fellow classmates. It may have happened to you that just before you walk into an exam, you talk to people about to do the exam with you and they ask you ‘Did you revise this XXX?’ and your heart drops because you know that’s the one topic you’ve forgotten. Then at this point, you don’t know whether to frantically check your notes or to walk into the exam feeling like you’ve almost already failed (even though that’s probably not possible). How to avoid this? Avoid the crowd – something people can feed into what triggers your exams so just stay solo for a bit. However, for others talking to people can ease their nerves – so either way take a path that will lead you towards the lowest possible stress for your exams.

5) Meditate or do some yoga. You weren’t expecting this one, were you? This can be seen as quite an unorthodox method that you want to quickly brush off but there’s really no harm in trying. Meditating can quiet your mind when you feel like it’s reeling with thoughts during your exam, it can help you visualise how you want your exams to go and it can help you control your breathing under a high pressure situation. Here are some recommendations to do just before your exam:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtF0T2fPvbI – this is an exam success meditation, it’s only 10 minutes, you literally lose nothing by just trying it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiKJRoX_2uo – this is a 7-minute stress relief yoga sequence – a little really goes a long way.

On a final note, BLOSSOM would like to tell you this:

Exams really aren’t that great; we don’t deny that but they aren’t the be-all and end-all either. All the stress that you are feeling is real and is not self-generated, you ARE being put under immense pressure, so if you’re anxious and stressed you’re just acting accordingly to your stimuli. However, it doesn’t always have to be that way. It is good to acknowledge exams are stressful but we must always find ways to deal with this stress. You have got this, it’s not the end of the world and believe it or not, you are more than a random letter or number on an exam paper. BLOSSOM believes in you, now go smash those exams!