At the end of every academic year, students are engrossed in intensive preparation for both internal and public examinations. Added to this come competitive exams such as NEET and GATE. Students are put to enormous strain and stress which may be termed as ‘examress’.
Instead of enjoying and cherishing happy moments, students feel petrified and stressed in the name of exams. The adolescent phase has transformed into a traumatic one.
Exam pressure can be categorised as follows:
Self-pressure: The impact of stress on an individual is determined by the pressure faced by him/her and his/her resilience and capability. The more the pressure from outside in the form of exams, the greater will be the ‘examress’ and the feeling of being stressed out. Resilience is the ability to pull oneself up from pressure and handle challenges effectively. Students have to develop resilience to handle exams.
Parental pressure: Nowadays, parents get emotionally carried away and consider exams as a do-or-die event; they want their children to outperform their peers. Instead, they should take into account their child’s inner dynamics, strengths and limitations, and act accordingly, rather than follow the norm that excelling in exams is the only way to get bright opportunities.
Pressure from teachers: At times teachers have a notion that creating anxiety about exams among their students might improve their performance. But this could demotivate the student and create negative thoughts of failure. Instead, teachers can create a positive environment to ensure that students feel in control.
Societal pressure: This stems from the country’s education system as our curriculum is more inclined towards memorisation and spending long systematic study hours, leaving less time for recreational activities and social gatherings.
Techniques
So now how to handle ‘examress’? It can be done by practising certain self regulating techniques. One such technique is cognitive restructuring — restructuring negative thoughts about exams and the awful consequences of failure by considering the fact that the repercussions might not be as disastrous as one imagines. Students can also focus their thoughts on their strengths rather than deficiencies.
Other new techniques such as chunking and chinmoku can also be practised. Chunking is process of taking individual pieces of information and grouping them into larger units. By grouping each piece of information collected from textbooks into a large whole, students can store more information. This method improves memory and recall. Chinmoku, followed by Japanese students, is a method of silencing the mind. By practising this, students can train their drifting mind and thoughts to come back to the present moment. Over a period of time, the mind will automatically start focussing on the present, increasing attention span, concentration, creative skills, memory recall and self awareness.
Practising yoga, meditation and pranayama may greatly improve memory and increase focus, attention and concentration. Eating nutritious food, having six hours of sleep a day, and engaging in outdoor activities will help rejuvenate the body and mind.
Regulating the pattern of study by practising distributed learning — studying a subject for fixed hours in a day over the course of several weeks — will be more beneficial than studying for 10 hours at a stretch over a long weekend. At bed time, students can try to visualise mentally and recapitulate all that has been studied during the day.
Exams are just small stepping stones in a student’s life, There are miles to go, with a plethora of opportunities on the way. Students have to rise above ‘examress’ with positive spirits.
The writer is a psychiatrist at the Institute of Mental Health. sujathaaimh@gmail.com
