Help your students tackle exam anxiety with our practical tips
Exam season is fast approaching and with it, soaring student anxiety levels. With Mental Health Awareness Week coming up in May, why not explore our free resources to help your students tackle worries with practical coping strategies…
When we worked with East Sussex College Group on a coaching project to tackle exam anxiety it was revealing to discover that 76% of students were worried about not doing well, with almost a third (30%) experiencing physical symptoms such as tense muscles and upset stomachs.
So what can we collectively do to alleviate such extreme worry? A great place to start is by downloading our Role Models ‘Worry’ resource and using it as a springboard for discussion during Mental Health Awareness Week (15-21 May), which this year is focused around the theme of anxiety.
Our Role Models resources have been created in collaboration with older students (aged 18+) who share their own life experiences and positive coping strategies with their near peers, to help them negotiate tricky subjects such as body image, fear of failure and gender and sexuality.
The Worry resource aims to help young people rationalise and contextualise their fears to avoid them becoming overwhelming, and provides them with lots of practical coping strategies that they can practise through different exercises including:
- Rationalising thoughts exercise
- Happy place exercise
- Physical movement exercises
- Positive affirmations exercise
The resource, comes with an accompanying Teachers’ workbook to help you create a dedicated wellbeing lesson, and includes plenty of carefully curated links to other free resources that students can explore in their own time, including:
- Free online yoga classes
- Guided meditation sessions
- Mindfulness videos
In the East Sussex College initiative, when students were introduced to mindfulness and breathing techniques that they could use before or during exams to overcome anxiety, a third felt better able to focus and a quarter felt more confident about their ability to do well.
So why not give our resources a try today? Learning practical stress management techniques could be the key to alleviating overwhelming pre-exam nerves for many of your students and could help them unlock the ability to perform at their very best.