How to Remain Calm Before an Exam: A Step-by-Step Guide
2 years ago
How to Remain Calm Before an Exam: A Step-by-Step Guide
Exams aren’t anyone’s friend. They’re stressful, boring, and somehow always manage to test the one part of the syllabus you forgot to study.
Exam stress is something that everyone’s faced, and so here at RESN we’ve compiled our step-by-step guide to remain calm before an exam! These are a few practical tips that can help you stay calm, prepared and confident before walking into the exam room.
(If you want more study and time management tips, the RESN Wiki is the best place to go. You can find studying tips here, here and here and time management strategies here and here.)
1. Preparing the Night Before
Preparing the night before means making sure your bag is packed, your uniform is ready to go, and your alarm is set for the morning. The last thing you want is to wake up and spend 20 minutes searching your house for a pen that works! Making sure you have everything ready to go when you wake up means you can stay focused and calm, instead of having to stress about things you might have forgotten!
2. Resetting Your Brain
Most students think that the key to acing an exam is to spend every minute before that exam cramming as much information into their brain as possible. This is a really great way of ensuring you don’t ace that exam. Instead, if you take your mind off the exam, you can reset your brain and go into the exam room with a clear head – not a head swirling with information you’ve just swallowed.
Ways of doing this could be going for a walk, listening to music, or having a snack.
3. Eating Well
Eating is an often-overlooked part of exam preparation. The last thing you want in an exam is a stomach that doesn’t stop rumbling! Having a snack before your exam helps boost your energy and focus, and will keep your stomach quiet. Some people can feel a bit queasy before stepping into an exam and eating is the last thing they feel like doing, but it’s still important to get something down!
Eating foods like bananas, nuts and berries are great options because they have been proven to increase mental performance, and are easy to get down if you’re feeling nervous before an exam.
4. Avoiding People Who Will Stress You Out
There are always the same few people hanging outside every exam room – people who will tell you that the exam is meant to be impossible, or that it will test areas that are outside the syllabus. And sitting next to those people are the ones with their notes spread out on the ground, desperately trying to cram as much information into their heads as possible.
Hanging around these types of people is a great way to feel super stressed and overwhelmed before an exam – so try and keep your distance. Stand somewhere that you can’t hear them, and trust the preparation and study you’ve already done!
5. Breathing
It might seem like ‘breathing’ is a pretty obvious way to do well in an exam because it ensures you won’t pass out! But when you’re feeling nervous or stressed, slowing down your breathing can really help your focus and concentration.
There are plenty of effective guided breathing videos on YouTube (like the Wim Hof technique), or alternatively ‘box breaths’ (in for 4 seconds, hold for 4 seconds, out for 4 seconds, hold again for 4 seconds) are really easy to do and can slow your heart rate down quickly.
With exams just around the corner, we really hope these tips and strategies can help with calming those nerves and lowering your stress levels!