How To Survive Exam Season: 5 Powerful Mindset Shifts

Discover how to handle the pressure of exam season through my five top “mental reframes” for stress-free, successful exam prep. Banish overwhelm, comparison, perfectionism and frustration and grab huge practical benefits too.

Whether you’re an anxious exam-taker, or a family member wondering just what to say to someone before an exam, these are the five powerful mindset hacks you need.

Want to watch instead? This article is also available in video form and in your favourite podcast player on the Exam Study Expert podcast:

Our mission is to provide reliable content to help students manage their academic journeys with sustainable, healthy habits. To ensure our articles meet a high standard, we follow a rigorous editorial process from research right through to regular review and correcting errors. Please see our Editorial Policy if you wish to learn more. 

5. What do you actually need?

Our tips countdown for preparing for exams without stress begins at number five: think about your goal in this exam.

Maybe it’s a simple pass / fail situation. Or maybe it’s a specific grade that you’d either like, perhaps to meet an offer from a college or university or employer, or perhaps simply because that’s the result you’ve set your sights on.

Goals are great for helping give us drive and focus in our exam prep.

But sometimes in the immediate run-up to an exam it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that almost all exam goals have room for error, and quite a lot of it at that.

Let’s say you need to score 75% on the exam to pass or to get the grade you’re looking for.

That means you can afford to drop one in every 4 marks – that’s a huge swathe of the paper you can get wrong and still achieve your goal.

So while I obviously encourage making good use of the final days in and around an exam to get prepared please don’t beat yourself up if you don’t finish every single past paper, if you don’t go back over every single topic, or even if there are still the odd corners of the paper that despite sensible efforts you haven’t quite managed to cover.

And by the way, having a large margin for error is increasingly common at high levels of academic study as the scope of your exams balloons wildly. You’ll almost never need to aim for 100% right answers so give yourself a break from perfectionism.

We often find ourselves in exam prep situations where we need to just prioritize our efforts. We can do anything, but we don’t have time to do everything, so we need to prioritize and focus.

So here’s the big question to ask someone who is stressed about their exams: what mark do you actually need in order to achieve your goals? It may be less than you think!

4. What’s your Plan B?

Speaking of exam goals, it’s time to acknowledge that they can inspire anxiety just as much as motivation.

If we’re so fixated on our goal, and especially if that goal is a stretch for our abilities, it can cause us so much stress and angst it makes it less likely not more likely we achieve the goal.

Now, this one may feel counterintuitive, but actually being more comfortable with your Plan B can be a real help here. What’s your plan if you miss the grade boundary required for your big goals?

It’s a slightly uncomfortable question, sure. But having a plan, thinking through the consequences and imagining all the fun potential opportunities that could come from your Plan B – that’s great for your mental health in exam season.

So we still shoot for the moon, we still shoot for success, of course.

But you’ll know that if it doesn’t work out, you have a backup adventure in place: a second university offer, the chance to re take, re apply, or go a different route.

You’ll be okay. Life doesn’t end at that point. 

When we take that intense pressure off your shoulders a little, instead of being fixated on Plan A, then you’ll find you can breathe again and have a better shot at achieving your potential. You might not needing that Plan B after all.

3. Focus on Your Race

Our third tip for a healthy mindset when you’re preparing for exams is: don’t get sidetracked with what your peers are up to. Who’s studied what, how much they’ve done, how they’re doing it, what they know, what marks they’re getting in their practice papers.

Don’t worry about any of it, it’s a recipe for getting caught up in your head and spiralling into exam anxiety – and I speak from experience here.

Now, if you’ve got a study buddy and you’re on the same page: someone who helps you feel calmer and supported? That’s a slightly different thing. A great study buddy can be a fantastic resource when you’re under exam season pressure.

But otherwise, try to turn down the volume your mental chatter about on what everyone else is up to in the exams.

So, if you’ve got friends who simply cannot shut up about what’s on the exams, or what they’re doing and how it’s going and it’s stressing you out? You’ve got to put yourself first. You can either:

• Gently but firmly set that boundary and say, “look, I’m getting quite stressed about these exams. Is it okay if we don’t talk about exams when we hang out?”
• Or, if they struggle to respect your boundaries, choosing to temporarily hang out with them less often for a few weeks while exams are on

Focus on your own race: focus on using your time well, doing what makes sense to you, making the best progress you can and not worrying about what the rest of the pack are up to.

2. Play the game to win (even if you don’t respect the rules)

This is an interesting hack to use when you’re preparing for exams you don’t like and struggle to revise for.

Quite a lot of you probably rather like learning: you enjoy academic pursuits, you tend to be good at it, and you like your subjects.

But sometimes, we come up against exams we just don’t really like.

There’s the classic school kid’s complaint of their maths or their geography exam being full of pointless stuff: “why would I ever need to factorise a quadratic or know about the different types of volcanoes in practice? I’m never going to use this in my future career.”

Even for older scholars, once you’ve specialised in your chosen field, there can be issues. Some of the medical specialists I coach in preparation for boards or speciality exams can develop a low respect for the exam, often especially if they’re in a re-take situation, having failed in the past.

You might also legitimately have a high level of expertise in the field. Perhaps you are involved in teaching or mentoring juniors in your field, and you fundamentally disagree with what’s on the exam or how it’s assessed.

Here’s the problem though. If your respect for the exam is low, it’s hard to show up at your best either in your prep or on the day.

I believe we’ve got to set aside our philosophical disagreements, and see the exam as a game, a game we’re going to play to win.

You might write the rules or the game differently. Perhaps one day you yourself will be writing the rules of the exam game in your field.

But for now, the game is as it is. There’s nothing we can do about that, so we should give it our all. We play it to win.

Finding a silver lining

Stop and brainstorm those good old transferable skills – what IS the experience of taking this exam going to teach you?

Maybe you never see a quadratic equation again, but learning to solve problems that you find challenging at first is a super useful skill in today’s world, I don’t care what field you’re going into.

Maybe you never need to know all those obscure tables of cytokines in your clinical practice, but developing the skill of memorising challenging and complex data is a valuable mental skill.

If nothing else, embrace the tricky problems or difficult memorisation challenges as all part of that game, as tests of character and your perseverance and tenacity. If thinking about your exam that way helps, that’s great. You’re developing your mental muscle to engage with challenges and break through them.

And that’s certainly a muscle we’d all want to develop.

So find your reasons why doing your best makes sense for you, and embrace the situation as it is.

1. Remember, it’s only a bloomin’ exam

Finally, my top tip for preparing for exams without (too much) stress and a healthy mindset:

Particularly if they’ve been your primary life goal for a while now, perhaps the culmination of literally years of work, a big exam or series of exams can understandably feel like a big deal.

You’ve put all that work in, you want to get the outcome you deserve.

But remember, exams don’t define who you are. They’re not your identity, you’re still an amazing, kind, generous human with all your unique traits and talents only a tiny portion of which are being tested by this exam.

My university tutor, a formidable but very down-to-earth scientist Professor Margaret Stanley always used to email us at the start of exam season with the advice to “remember, it’s only a bloomin’ exam”:

Her way of giving some much-needed perspective to a bunch of anxious students. And take it from me, it’s excellent advice.

Want more tips on preparing for exams?

Looking for more advice on how to keep your cool and prep effectively during exam season?

We’ve recently been talking on the Exam Study Expert podcast about how to survive and thrive when you’re in exam taking mode. Here’s three great episodes that I recommend you give a listen to during your next study breaks:

• ep. 222 on eating your frogs during exam prep
• ep. 224 on “the easy button” for exam success
• and ep. 225, a pro stuntman’s advice on handling exam pressure

You’ll find plenty of killer advice on how to build up a powerful toolkit of strategies that will help you bring your A game when it matters most. Even when the pressure’s on for a big exam.

You can do this. Wishing you the best of luck this exam season.

Got a question about exam prep? Want to share which of these ideas you’re going to write on a post-it note by the kettle this exam season? Drop a comment below for expert advice!

The Science Of Studying Smart

Download my free exam success cheat sheet: all my #1 must-know strategies to supercharge your learning today.

Are You A…?ParentStudentEducator

Yes! Send me the secrets

Your privacy protected. No spam. Unsubscribe any time.

---