Living in the Moment

How to beat exam stress.

Sixth year, huh? Am I right? I’ll say no more than that, because you all know what I’m talking about.

I wonder who decided that the most stressful and important time of our lives, the time when most work needs to be done, should take place in our teenage years. You can be developing too fast or too slow, you’re socially anxious and worried about fitting in, you find everything is going out of its way to irritate you and you just feel so angry all the time. (Hey! Stop breathing so loudly! Some of us are trying to write an article over here! Honestly...)

In case you didn’t get the memo, last week was mental health week and it gave me a lot of food for thought about the detrimental effect too much pressure can have on our wellbeing. As a teenage girl with a lot of ambition, this is already something I’ve been thinking about quite a lot, but I really liked the idea of taking time out specifically to think about it and talk about it.

For example, the supplement in the Irish Independent which I’ll mention later, as well as a Twitter campaign called #createsparks which you can still join now. As someone who emigrated here five years ago, I have to say I’m impressed by the way Ireland is now becoming so open and helpful about mental health and mental disabilities, too.

But I digress. I don’t really know much about the several kinds of mental anxiety, and I’ll always be grateful for that, but I have of course experienced common-or-garden exam stress. Since fifth year, I’ve been expecting this to take its toll. After all, I suffered through the Junior Cert. I went into Sixth Year with the attitude of a First World War veteran who’s been called up as an experienced General to fight Hitler. (In this analogy, I suppose Fifth Year was the Great Depression... interesting). August and September were largely spent apologising in advance to friends and family for any imminent tantrums, but I still wasn’t quite prepared for the stress and worry this term would bring. Hours of study when all you want to do is sleep, and numerous tests when no matter how hard you revise, you barely scrape by...

I’ve come up with a little formula which might help. I call it “Living in the Moment”. Rather than panicking about how many things you have to do this week, month or year, just concentrate on the little chunk you’re working on at that moment. I’m not talking partying every night with strangers, drinking too much and taking drugs while yelling “YOLO” ...I just think we should all try and take life one step at a time.

Picture this: It’s a busy night. You have an English essay due in the morning, five exam questions to do and a maths test next afternoon. The instinct is to rush through the written homework all the time fretting about the test... or alternatively try to get your last-minute revision done while worrying about what you’ll write in your essay. If you let everything get on top of you like that, you’re going to end up with a half-done essay, wrongly-answered exam questions and all you’ll be able to think about during your maths test will be the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty...

Of course, a possible solution would be for teachers to take pity on us and remember that students study at least seven subjects for the Leaving Cert... but until hell freezes over, my solution is to Live in the Moment. Concentrate on one thing at a time, because no matter what gender you are, multitasking rarely works out properly and something invariably has to give.

Focus on what you’re doing when you’re doing it, and nothing else. When you’re in class, there’s no point checking what’s happening next or worrying about all the work you have to do: just listen carefully to what’s going on, take down all your notes and try to concentrate as best you can. Remember that every part of the lesson you take in will make that night’s revision a lot easier.

When you’re doing any homework questions you’ve been set, take the time to really think about them rather than getting it done as quickly as possible: remember homework is part of revision too.

Of course we’re worried about the future, and indeed it can be motivating to have long-term goals. But there’s no point sitting around fretting about how many points or grades you need for your ideal course when you could be spending that time revising. If it’s a subject like biology or business, for example, you should just choose a chapter to revise and forget about everything else.

Don’t worry about any other subject or anything in your personal life: take those few pages and give your entire mind to them for half an hour. I know when you’re under pressure and stress, this is easier said than done, but you’d be amazed at how much you’ll take in. Make a list and prioritise so you can say to yourself “I don’t need to worry about that yet, I’ll focus on x and do y when I’m finished.”

Brendan O’Connor wrote an article about managing stress for the Independent supplement, which my mum read aloud to me and then cut out and kept—I think there may be a hint somewhere in there... He talked about taking time out, which you can find here . Time out doesn’t just mean watching TV and letting your mind wander to all those things in your personal life or at school you need to worry about, it means taking a few moments in the week to forget about everything for a while. This is the same with studying: just forget about everything you need to be doing and focus on what you are doing.

Living in the moment makes each moment so much more valuable.

Incidentally, I wrote half this article with the telly on in the background and it was taking forever. Once I switched it off, the rest was done in about ten minutes.