Showing posts with label Stress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Stress. Show all posts
The Mind Set from BBC Bitesize: Smart advice from exam survivors
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Tough Exam?
If you want to talk to us after an exam to clear your mind. Please come and find any member of staff before going home
Never go on Twitter after an exam – here's why
Post-exam discussions about what answers you gave have been replaced by social media frenzies, writes a student blogger
Sometimes it's best not to discuss answers after an exam – you might just end up stressed. Photograph: Alamy
A few weeks ago, I took my GCSE English literature exam. Everything seemed to go well – the questions were predictably similar to past papers and the unseen poem, (Long Distance II by Tony Harrison,) was easy to understand and empathise with – or so I thought. But logging onto my Twitter account I found a completely different story.
Twitter unintentionally allowed everyone doing AQA English to link into one huge spider's web. A quick search revealed one very worrying tweet: "Wait, what. The dad in Long Distance II was dead too?" Wait, what? This was not something I had picked up on.
How could it be that after preparing so much for the exam, working so hard on my analysis, I had failed to notice that crucial detail? It may have been subtly contained in a single line – "you haven't both gone shopping" – but I was still kicking myself.
The reaction on Twitter was instant. The majority of responses were filled with frustration, some along the lines of "stupid unseen poem" or the beautifully understated "I think I may have misinterpreted that last Long Distance II text a little bit". Most were sprinkled creatively with expletives.
But there were a few, slightly smug tweets, along the lines of: "So happy that I picked up on the fact that the father died in the literature exam today!" which just rubbed salt into the wound.
After an anxious exchange of capitalised messages with friends, including many, many variations of "WHAT" and "HOW" peppered with emoticons, I decided that this revelation would not, in fact, cause us all to fail.
Nevertheless, our reactions were undoubtedly a warning signal to the excess stress that using social media can cause in an already nerve-racking time of year. Students love social media, but having instant contact with other students post-exam can do more bad than good.
Logging onto Twitter is a good way to "torture yourself after the exam by looking up answers" as one student at my school put it. Some might say it is the internet equivalent of those unpleasant experiences outside the exam hall where the answers are discussed between students. Discussions like this cause extra stress – and Twitter gives students a bigger platform to add to each others worries.
In spite of the stress, next exam season I won't be deleting my Twitter account – I just won't be logging on straight after an exam. Throughout the exam period it can be a useful place to share revision tips and talk to other students in the same position as you. Revising can be a lonely experience, and social media makes you realise that you're all in it together. Just don't spend too long worrying about that one question you got wrong.
How stressed are you?
Stress is part of everyday life and can be beneficial. But high levels over a long period can be seriously bad for our health.
The following test has been created with the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy for National Stress Awareness Day. It has been designed to help you spot symptoms of stress and find out how well you are coping with the pressure of everyday life.
Scoring: never - 0, almost never - 1, sometimes - 2, often - 3 and very often - 4.
Continue reading the main story
Stress test
How often do you find yourself being irritable with friends and family?
Click Here to take the test
All questions and advice provided by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy and Professor Cary Cooper, the association's former president.
Web production by: Christopher Ashton, Salim Qurashi and Lucy Rodgers
BASE Stress App
Brookvale CAMHS has created a new free self-help app called BASE that has been designed to help young people manage their stress, anxiety and depression. The app allows you to write diary entries which help you keep track of when your stress and anxiety might be at its best or worst. This will help you understand how to manage your emotions.
The app also provides handy tips on how to calm down and relax. It even produces entry reports which shows the emotions you feel the most. The app logs this data into a 7 day graph so you can see how much your mood changes over a week!BASE is used to help you note down your feelings so you can understand when your stress and anxiety is at its worse, instead of relying on memory.
Anxiety
Anxiety self-help website links and anxiety app for phones for young people
We have been given some sites and information for Students wanting help with pressure in the lives.
They suggested italk:- https://www.italk.org.uk/ - which offers one to one counselling either over the phone or face to face
They also gave us these self-help websites
If you are worried about anything please remember Odyssey Drop In Thursdays in 565 from 3pm
Recolor
We thought some of you might like this?
The theory behind colouring books for adults is that they relieve the stress and anger of our daily lives, even if their very existence makes some critics purple-faced with rage.
These books are a bona fide publishing industry trend, though: boosting business for retailer WHSmith in the UK, fuelling a rise in non-fiction sales for US publishers, and helping Amazon chill out some of its customers in south London.
This being 2016, inevitably there are now apps for that. iOS app Recolor is the work of developer Sumoing, whose Repix, Relook and Camu photography apps have been downloaded more than 25m times.
The Finnish company has created more than 200 illustrations for the app, with a simple set of colouring tools to change individual areas of each picture with a tap.
This being 2016 (still) the app uses the freemium model that’s now dominant on the major app stores: it can be downloaded and used for free, but individual illustration packs – from animals, fishes and insects to isometric images and bejewelled skulls – can be bought using in-app purchases.
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