Effective Exam Preparation: Self-Care, Managing Worries, and Stress Relief (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: When it comes to exam preparation, the most important thing to remember is to eat and sleep right. This is a key building block to success. Self-care is so important. And now let's move on to worries. What about tackling those worrisome thoughts? Maybe thoughts revolving around worries related to the exam that is coming up, or a report that's coming up. So what do we do? What you want to do the first step is to first of all not banish or repress those worrisome thoughts because they will come back around to haunt you like a boomerang. And as Carl Jung used to say, what you resist persists. Here's a simple experiment that we can try for the next 30 seconds to show you what I mean. So for the next 30 seconds, close your eyes and try not to think of a piece of delicious chocolate cake with a red cherry on top. No thoughts of chocolate cake. Pause for 30 seconds. Now, were you able to do this? Well, if you're like me and everyone else, you weren't able to because in order to not think about something, we first have to conjure up an image of that thing in the first place. So instead of thinking about what you don't want to have, what you don't want to do, repressing the worrisome thoughts, it is much more effective to think about what you do want to do, what your goals and your dreams are, and the steps that you can take to get there. And the last thing, it's a strategy for stress, and it's something that I use in the moment when I'm feeling stressed. And it is the belly breathing exercise. And the background to this is that when we're feeling stressed, our muscles are tense, our breathing is shallow, so we want to calm the body and to calm the nervous system. And this is where the belly breathing exercise comes in handy. So what you do is you imagine that in your stomach, you've got a balloon. And as you're breathing in, this balloon expands. You expand your stomach. You breathe out, the balloon contracts. You contract your stomach. Do this a few times. Do it for two minutes. And you will see that after this time, you will be feeling calmer and a little bit more in control. And the last thing that I want to say is if you are struggling, there's always help available through the university and through your college.