How to Manage Exam Stress and Study Smart

It’s study and exam time, and I feel for you. I’m so relieved we all survived five years of exams in our own house. Just remember, you will all survive it too. Here are the ideas that helped us, alongside a few thoughts from others.

Study in a variety of ways

Mnemonics genuinely help teenagers memorise, we all use them from time to time without necessarily noticing. They’re simply memory devices that help recall larger pieces of information, especially lists, characteristics, steps, sequences. A classic example: Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain, to remember the colours of the rainbow, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Or turning the first letter of each item in a list into a memorable phrase or acronym of their own. Encourage your teenager to make up their own, a silly, personal one sticks far better than a borrowed one. One teenager I worked with watched You Tube videos at double the speed. It worked for her!.

Doubling up with a friend, revising the same material together, testing each other, explaining tricky bits out loud, can genuinely help too. Saying something aloud to someone else forces a different kind of processing than reading silently ever does, and it makes revision feel a little less lonely.

Different brains study differently too, some teenagers learn best by writing things out, others by saying them aloud, drawing diagrams, or teaching the material back to you or a sibling. This matters even more for ADHD and neurodivergent teenagers, where a single, fixed method of revising rarely suits, mixing it up isn’t a distraction, it’s often exactly what keeps the material actually landing.

Think about siblings too

If your teenager has younger siblings at home, it’s worth suggesting they revise somewhere quieter, the library, or a friend’s house, if home feels too distracting. It also helps to let younger siblings know what’s going on, exams are happening, and their older sibling might be more stressed than usual right now. A little understanding from the whole household goes a long way.

Take real breaks

Revising for hours on end simply isn’t effective. Help your teenager build in proper breaks, a healthy snack, some movement, stretching, yoga, throwing or kicking a ball around. Practise deep breathing together too, it’s a genuinely useful reset between study sessions, not just for exam day itself.

Managing the stress and anxiety itself

Exam time raises the temperature at home for everyone, not just your teenager. It’s worth being honest about that, and thinking about the atmosphere you’re creating too. A tense, anxious household makes an already anxious teenager more anxious, not less. Try to keep the rest of home life as calm and predictable as you can through this period, even if study itself feels chaotic.

Some teenagers experience real anxiety around exams, racing thoughts, a tight chest, feeling sick beforehand, sometimes tipping into something closer to panic on the morning of an exam itself. This is your teenager’s Guard Dog, the amygdala, sounding an alarm as though the exam itself were a genuine threat. Naming this plainly can help enormously, “your body thinks this is dangerous, it isn’t, it’s just hard,” alongside a few slow, deep breaths together before they go in. A few simple vagal tone exercises can genuinely help settle a racing nervous system in these moments too, my blog 7 Five-Minute Vagal Tone Calm Down Exercises is worth practising together well before exam day, so it’s already familiar when your teenager actually needs it.

If exam-specific anxiety feels bigger than typical nerves, ongoing, physically intense, genuinely disrupting sleep or eating, it’s worth reading my blog Anxiety in Children: Recognising the Key Signs alongside this one, and my free guide Holding in the Storm is worth keeping close by for the exam period itself, it covers exactly what to say, and what not to say, when your teenager is genuinely struggling.

A surprising one: rosemary

Dr Mark Moss of Northumbria University found that the aroma of rosemary essential oil can meaningfully improve working memory in children. In his study, forty children aged ten and eleven were tested on a range of mental tasks, some in a room with rosemary oil diffused for ten minutes beforehand, others in a plain, unscented room. Those exposed to rosemary performed notably better, especially on tasks involving recalling words. It’s a small, low-effort thing to try, a few drops of rosemary oil in a diffuser during a study session, and it costs nothing to test whether it helps your own teenager.

Above all, remember to help them balance

There is so much more to life than exams. I wish you and your children the very best through this.

Interested in working with me?

If you would like more tailored support for your child or family, I offer one to one therapy for children and young people, therapeutic parenting support for parents, and training and consultation for professionals working with children and families. Please do get in touch if you would like to find out more.

You can reach me via my contact page.

Free resources

Understanding Your Child’s Guard Dog Brain explains what is happening in your child’s nervous system when big feelings take over.

Holding in the Storm is about staying steady as a parent in the hard moments.

When Darkness Comes includes specific support for sleep difficulties and anxiety at night.

All free to download.

References

Moss, M. and Earle, V. Northumbria University, presented at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference, 2017.

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With warmth,
Catherine