The study confirms that mindfulness can help improve concentration and ultimately performance at any intellectually challenging task, as it helps eliminate mind wandering and improves working memory capacity. Don’t feel that you need to fill up all your time with doing. For more information see our. Prof Peter Jones, also from Cambridge’s psychiatry department added: “The evidence is mounting that mindfulness training can help people cope with accumulative stress. It can be traced back to our ancestors whose survival depended on the ability to escape a predator. The Five Senses Drill. It helps us see with a bit of perspective, without judgement and with kindness to ourselves. The idea of mindfulness involves being ‘present’; being more conscious of life and our surroundings as they happen. Mindfulness is a powerful tool that can empower students to deal with exam-related stress and anxiety. Anyone who has to face high-stress situations, such as students preparing for exams, can benefit from it. Essentially, we believe we are being faced with a lion – not just an English test.” Amy says. Using mindfulness, this state of stress can be managed – and it can even help us perform. Just as mindfulness can help with reducing exam stress, it can also aid students in accepting and dealing with the feeling of failure after a bungled exam. Notice. Cambridge’s study on mindfulness could be a possible solution to help university students cope better. When we learn to focus the attention consciously on an anchor (such as the body or our breath), the present takes on an objective quality, as if watching it on a screen,” she says. It teaches us the ability to accept and sit with difficult feelings in the same way that we can with happy ones. Inhale gently for two seconds, hold your breath for a moment and then exhale slowly. In the past few years, mindfulness has become a buzzword that you often see on social media or on the covers of wellness magazines. Subscribe to our Newsletter to Receive Updates: Beyond Revision – A Guide to Exam Stress Management. By clicking accept, we will assume that you consent to your cookies being collected. Notice what you are doing as you are doing it and tune in to your senses. Mindfulness can help you to stay calm, remain focused, and put life into perspective – a fantastic tool when coping with exam stress. Take a few deep breaths, grow aware of your contact with the chair again. But what causes exam anxiety? To raise the odds of survival, our brains evolved to switch into fight-or-flight mode as a response to danger – whether that danger was real or imagined. Count ten breaths in and out, noticing and watching each breath, one at a time. Observe the weight of your body against the chair. With 15 years’ experience in teaching and educational publishing, she now combines first-hand understanding with certified training in wellbeing practices to help educators and students find inner calm in a stressful world. Another key stress area is in studying, where almost six in 10 reported it made it difficult for them to cope. When you are eating, notice the colour, texture and taste of the food. It can be tremendously helpful for teenagers, whose brains are going through radical changes and making it very difficult for them to deal with emotional situations – like exams – objectively. To delve deeper into the concept of mindfulness, we spoke with Amy Malloy, accredited meditation trainer and an advocate of mindfulness in … What does a lion and an English test have in common? This decentering allows us to choose how to respond to events, be they negative or positive. Keep bringing your attention back to these activities until you feel calm and relaxed. Follow these few short steps to begin your journey towards being mindful: Mindfulness can help you to stay calm, remain focused, and put life into perspective – a fantastic tool when coping with exam stress. “Another lovely practice is to encourage students to notice positive events in their day. Amy recommends trying to encourage students to practice every day at home as well. CXK Ltd. Being ‘present’ not only makes us more productive, but allows us to enjoy life to the fullest. Gratitude. So simply taking a few moments to close the eyes and focus on the breath going in through the nose and out again can be very powerful,” she says. As part of the service, we provide person-centred counselling and brief solution-focused interventions which build emotional resilience and coping skills in children and young people. Other troubles students face in university were isolation (44 percent), balancing work and study (37 percent), financial difficulties (36 percent) and living independently (22 percent). what happens to your muscles as you do this. Source: Shutterstock. This should help lower students’ stress levels and increase concentration. Repeat this exercise every now and then to deliberately bring your awareness to what is happening in the present moment and to build your resilience to deal with exam anxiety and general pressures around this time of the academic year by cultivating mindfulness in this way. Mindfulness is a powerful tool that can empower students to deal with exam-related stress and anxiety. “While meditation does have its roots in more spiritual practices, it is also a scientifically supported reality that breathing and focusing mindfully actively reduces stress,” Amy says. To find out more about our privacy policy, click below. Notice what the contact feels like. Referring back to our last article, it takes us away from the fear of a physical threat in our mind and encourages us to focus on the reality of the situation: often when doing so we might find that the exam isn’t quite as stressful as our mind is making it out to be through fear. A quick breathing meditation can calm your brain down enough to let it access all the knowledge you’ve (hopefully) been stockpiling over the past weeks and get it all down on paper. Read more about the role of mindset in coping with stress. “While these benefits may be similar to some other preventative methods, mindfulness could be a useful addition to the interventions already delivered by university counselling services. “One of the wonderful benefits of mindfulness practice is the development of an inner resilience. Find out how students can use mindfulness to combat pre-exam anxiety and how teachers can help them master the art of being in the moment.