 Hello and welcome back. Today I am talking about exam stress and specifically how we can look to somewhat reduce the stress of exams and these tips will hopefully be helpful whether you are a young person, whether you're a parent or a teacher or a carer or anyone who is either approaching exams or who cares about someone who is. Now the very first thing I want to do is to somewhat normalise exam stress so we do sometimes get caught up in this loop of overly worrying about the amount of stress that exams cause and granted when we get to the point where they're causing significant mental health impairment then that's an issue. When we're finding young people who are having a significant impact day in and day out on their ability to engage in normal activities and that's going on for weeks on end then that's an issue when it's causing self harm or it's causing issues with their eating or seeing significant anxiety or depression that is an issue. However exams are something that almost everybody faces at some point and almost everybody finds objectively stressful and that's okay. Actually exams are quite a good opportunity for young people to learn about how to manage stressful situations. If we take the right approach towards exams and we help young people to recognise the physiological impact of stress, how to look after themselves well in order to minimise the impact that that stress has on their performance and on their ability to engage in their normal lives then we can help them to better tackle other objectively stressful and difficult situations when they arise later on. So if for example they later on go through a bereavement or a loss of some kind for example they would be able to apply some of these skills again. So there is a positive to the stress of exams. We are in a situation where many young people will face exams those exams are stressful what can we do to support that. So number one is to do what I've just done and to help to normalise it somewhat. Often a young person who's feeling highly stressed about exams won't realise that the way that they're feeling is just how everyone else is feeling and so actually knowing that other people feel the same generations before you and generations after you will also find this stressful it's normal to find this stressful and it might not be pleasant but it's normal that's a really really helpful thing to impart. The next one is to help young people to understand that to a certain extent the stress that they feel around their exams is quite good. Harnessed in the right way this stress this anxiety is the thing that enables them to concentrate for three hours through the length of a whole exam and perform to the best of their ability hopefully. That's a long time to concentrate for and it's not a particularly normal thing to have to do but the kind of physiological stress response we have the adrenaline etc that kind of keeps us going means that we are able to sustain that response in just the same way that you know someone who is a hundred meter sprinter feels a great deal of kind of stress and anxiety and adrenaline pumping as they wait for that stark under fire and that's what gets them as fast as possible to the end of the race and so actually we can use this to our advantage. Also obviously feeling somewhat apprehensive and stressed about exams upcoming is the kind of thing that will motivate us to put in place the right measures to ensure that we do our best in those exams so that means doing things like actually putting the grind in and doing the revision which might not be the first thing we choose to do otherwise so stress can be somewhat good. Next in order to help young people to minimize that the stress that they're feeling and to promote their performance and their well-being we need to help them understand that before they do anything else they need to get their physical health right so all young people all people need to think about their physical health because this absolutely underpins our mental health we need to make sure we're getting enough good quality sleep we need to make sure that we are eating regularly and healthily and we need to make sure that we are being somewhat active and getting outside if we can. Now these are not the easiest things to get right particularly when you're very busy in the lead-up to things like exams but these these are the absolute cornerstone to staying well when we get the physical underpinnings right then that means that our kind of mental and emotional resilience is much much higher and we're much better able to manage the rest of everything else if you think about how hard you find it to manage a difficult situation if you're tired or you're hungry for example and then think about being perpetually in that state perhaps because you are depriving yourself of sleep or not eating properly because you are stressed about exams and then think about trying to revise to the best of your cognitive ability the two just don't really go together so we need to really really help them understand the the importance of that that physical health and with that goes things like encouraging young people not to give up all of the activities that they did prior to their exam revision and the exam period so the tendency can be that everything else gets dropped in favour for revision and that can mean that they're not doing things like team sports and activities that can be a really important underpinning of their physical health and can also be just a generally really really good outlet for kind of stress and anxiety period that links into my next point which is to emphasise with young people the importance of downtime now granted for some young people this isn't the one we want to major on we want to be actually encouraging them to do a bit more work but increasingly I get talked to by parents and by teachers who are worried by the sheer volume of hours that young people put into their studying in order to study effectively we need to make sure that young people are building in regular breaks and exactly what works best for them will depend partly on what they're studying how old they are how they most effectively work and part of our kind of study skills development will be helping them to identify that but there certainly is an absolute need for downtime our brain needs a break and so we need to encourage them to have that downtime build it into the revision timetable downtime so they don't feel guilty about it and to actually do something completely different they need to be given permission by parents by teachers by themselves to actually take genuine proper breaks if we have these scheduled breaks but we say like this is actual downtime and I'm going to take it between three o'clock and four o'clock on Saturday then we can make sure we have a really really good well-defined break and then we get back to working to the best of our ability in in as we return to the timetable so I mentioned there as well the importance of study skills which feels like a slightly strange thing to link into a video about stress but actually one of the things that's most stressful in the run-up to exams is young people who don't feel like they're going to be able to perform to their best and obviously in order to perform to our best in our exams we need to have a good understanding of the topic that we are going to be examined on and we've got to have good skills for actually tackling that exam to the best of our ability and so we must never underestimate the importance of teaching good study skills to our students when thinking about how we can promote their well-being in the run-up to exams. It sounds like a really simple thing but sometimes it's the thing that we're missing in in the jigsaw and sometimes we're too busy thinking about healthy coping skills and breathing techniques and things like that rather than actually thinking right how can we just make sure that the kids are performing the best that they can what do I need to do here in terms of study skills in terms of increasing subject knowledge then we do need to teach our healthy coping skills so I've just kind of dissed them in the last bit there it's not that they're not important it's just that study skills are even more important than healthy coping skills because actually we just want kids to do really well in the exam so we teach our study skills then we're going to think about our healthy coping skills and that is thinking about how do we manage when we begin to feel very anxious we can think about healthy coping in the short term so things that we could do literally as we're about to go into an exam or if we feel the panic rising and that might be things like using our box breathing techniques or other breathing techniques we might be thinking about also things to help us become calm enough in order to get things like effective sleep so calming strategies for the evening we might also be thinking about how we deal with frustration or anger or upset that we might feel while we're studying because what we can often find is that we are somewhat more emotionally turbulent during this time and that that kind of that ongoing stress of knowing the exams are coming up can mean that our emotions are a lot less in check helping them to to recognize and manage the different emotions that they might be feeling and ensuring that they've got lots of different strategies in their kind of healthy coping toolbox if you like that they can turn to before they turn to unhealthy coping mechanisms like drinking or self-harm or the use of food as a way of managing and so we want to make sure instead that they're writing or drawing or singing or painting or playing with their dog or playing with their playstation whatever it might be and we want to make sure that they know what to turn to what to use as those healthy coping skills next we need to make sure that our young people know how to seek help if they need it now that's not just help for mental or emotional well-being issues that is also help with academic issues because when we're in the run-up to exams as I said before one of the things that's most likely to stress us out is if we feel we don't have mastery of our subjects and we're really genuinely worried about how we're going to do in that exam so we need to make sure that young people know how to access support with academic work and that becomes particularly important if they do go away on study leave and we need to make sure they do feel supported they know how and when to ask for help and what will happen if they do also it is good if we can help them to know where to look for help if they're worried about themselves or a friend emotionally as well if we see the warning signs or a young person becomes concerned about themselves and needs extra help it's great if they know where to look for help whether that's us that we've highlighted specific websites we've let them know to talk to a parent or GP or we let them know who at school they might talk to we just need to let them know what next steps to take if they're worried finally we can help with this whole exam stress thing by setting exams into a slightly wider context now what can happen in the run up to exams whichever level they're at is that we become very very tunnel visioned and we worry hugely about these exams as if they are the most important thing that has ever or will ever happen and granted at this point in this young person's life this might be the most important thing they've done to date and it might be something that's going to have a huge impact on their future what can be helpful is to kind of address that catastrophizing voice that says what if I go in and I completely fail what if I fail everything okay what if you do fail everything what then and actually thinking about literally what is the worst thing that can happen can kind of sometimes be helpful because it puts it in context we can also think about well actually is it really going to have you know that big an impact is it really going to change your whole life if you don't do well in this exam and really try to set the context for that the other thing that we can do is to help that young person to think about it from the point of view of someone else and say well actually if your friend was feeling like this what would you kind of say to them do you think they'd be likely to fail all their exams and actually try and look at the evidence that supports their viewpoint so if they have this very sort of catastrophic point a few of you know I'm not good enough I'm going to fail actually asking the question is that likely to be true do you have a good understanding of the subject do you have a good track record in doing okay here has your teacher predicted that you're probably going to do all right and are you doing enough work and if you if all those things are true which they are for many young people then the answer is that they're likely to do okay and that's important to understand too to really kind of understand that to look for the evidence that things will likely be okay okay I hope that was helpful if you would like to see my future videos please subscribe leave a comment down below with your suggestions additions experiences etc and if you like the video please give it a thumbs up and I'll see you next time bye