Exam Pressure

How to stop the stress

We've all been through it. The stress that exams bring to us, but it's more than that. The pressure of exams is largely due to the fact that we need them to tell us what to do when they're finished. If we pass our GCSE's, we use the results to pick our A-levels. If we pass our A-levels, we use the results to choose the next step, whether we go to university or not. But I think we need to take a step back and look at the big picture. We need to live in the present. A big chunk of our worries are that we don't know what to do in the future, or if we will get the right grades to live out our dreams. But this time in our lives is supposed to be about having fun and making mistakes.

Being a teenager is plagued with the fact that we only have a short time to figure out what we want to do with the rest of our lives, but we need to remember that what we choose now may not be what we want to do in 10 years time. When we were 5, we probably wanted to be actresses and actors, or princesses and princes. However, some of us have discarded those dreams and tried to think of something more realistic. That's the divide the people in the world. Some are dreamers, some are realists. Personally, I'm a bit of both. Especially when it comes to exams. I dream of getting the best grades and outdoing everyone in my year, but I'm enough of a realist to know that there is not a big possibility.

It's hard to stop competing with people. When doing exams, we don't realise that we are actually competing with everyone in the country who is doing the same exams as us. When we apply for colleges and universities, we are trying to beat everyone else so that we can get the best possible places. But we need to remember that being the best isn't always the best for us. We re all individuals, with different goals and different ideas of achievement.

A big part of avoiding exam stress is our revision/study habits. We want to avoid looking like the picture below:

 

 

 

Cramming our revision is a way of stressing us out because we don't know how much we've learnt and we think we need to know more than we do. It's great if we have the natural knowledge the pass, but most of us have to work that extra bit harder to get the grades that we want. We think that getting in as much information as we can is the answer, but what we need to realise is that the most important thing about cramming is that we make sure that we can actually remember what we revise. Exams test our memory, not our knowledge.

Take regular breaks from studying and make sure that you are not pushing yourself too hard. No one wants to fail any exams but, at the end of the day, if you happen to fail a exam, in 5 years, it may not even affect you. This isn't me telling you not to care about exams, this is me saying that a sure-fire way to fail your exams is to stress out about passing them.