Exam Stress vs Future Success: How to Shift Your Mindset for Positive Outcomes
It's that time of year again, all over the UK students are beginning to revise for upcoming exams and assessments. Today we start a two-part series on the subject of assessments and exams. This Episode is all about understanding exam stress, where it sits with you and introducing ideas for calming heightened levels of stress or arousal. The second episode, Episode 66 will be about introducing other helpful strategies for managing yourself through times of exams and assessments. In this episode we discuss: The Yerkes and Dodson explanation of stress arousal levels and the inverted U shaped curve. We talk about stress being a normal and necessary response to a requirement to perform and what contributes to creating an optimal state. What it feels like to move away from the optimal state and the impact our thinking can have on increasing stress levels beyond the optimal zone. We introduce a very simple but effective way to help create distance and perspective in relation to our thoughts. Why a double sided coin is a great analogy for understanding why we feel heightened levels of arousal. A mnemonic for thinking about thoughts – THINK, listen to discover more... Why we have a lot more control over our emotions than we think.