Discover how to navigate exam season for your wellbeing and theirs

As exam season kicks in,you as a parent are in full support mode. You are doing the practical things that help everything run smoothly.You’re collecting your teenager from late night study sessions, making sure they’re eating properly, encouraging them to get some fresh air, and double checking that they have everything they need. You spend your time googling everything you should be doing to support your child this exam season.Aside from all the practical things you do you are also the emotional anchor.

As parents it can be a tough and exhausting time, leaving you feeling stressed and anxious. As a mum of two teenagers(my own daughter sat her Junior Certificate last year), I know exactly what you are going through.

Let me ask you, how are you supporting yourself right now?

Think of the safety instructions on an aeroplane to put on your own oxygen mask first before your childs. Before you support your child, you need to take the time to support yourself not as an after thought, but as an essential part of getting through this season with care and resilience.

When you support yourself through your own stress and anxious feelings in exam season, you can then offer the calm, grounded presence your child needs the most during exam time.

When you gently bring care and nourishment into your own life, tending to your body, your emotions, and your mind you will find that calm and steadiness naturally reaches your child. They absorb it simply by being with you.

I hear you, as you say “this isn’t about me, the house is busy and there is so much to do, how can I possibly take time to look after me”.

But here’s something important and the game changer for you looking after yourself isn’t a luxury. It’s not taking something away from your child,it’s part of how you support them. Your steadiness, your presence, your capacity to stay calm in the chaos, are some of the most powerful things you offer. And they come from a place of being resourced yourself, even in small, simple ways.

In this blog, I’m going to show you how Mindfulness can help you do just that,in simple, doable ways that fit into your already full days. Because when you’re physically and emotionally supported during exam time, you can offer the calm, grounded presence you and your child needs.

The 3 essential steps to support yourself (and your child) through exam season

1. Bring Mindful awareness to your own anxiety by allowing and tuning in

For parents when their child is sitting an exam it can bring them back to their own childhood experiences of taking exams. Exams can stir up your own memories and patterns. Maybe you felt pressure to perform. Maybe your parents didn’t understand or support you. Maybe anxiety has been a lifelong companion.The upcoming exams for your child can be reigniting anxious feelings for you.

The feeling behind anxiety is fear and this feeling can present with a lot of uncomfortable bodily sensations. It can be present as tightness in the chest, heart racing, sweaty palms, pain in the head and butterflies in the stomach. It is normal to want your child to do well and it is manifesting as physical symptoms. The anxiety can also show up as an internal chatter, “my child is not studying enough” and “this is going to go bad”.

A big part of Mindfulness is awareness and self-reflection. A useful exercise is to reflect and journal on how it feels for you when anxiety comes to visit, drawing out a picture of what anxiety looks like and naming it can be helpful in allowing the feeling and bringing it to the surface.

Reflection gives insights and awareness, we allow and label the anxiety in order to manage the anxiety. When we allow what is there we can respond to ourselves with kindness and compassion.Mindfulness invites us to notice without judgment. You don’t have to fix everything,just start with noticing what’s alive in you. That awareness is powerful in itself.

2. Cultivate a healthy attitude towards anxiety

I see a lot of parents who feel that anxiety is a feeling that needs to be fixed and eliminated. They try to shove the feeling to the side, that if they pretend it doesn’t exist it won’t be a problem. By doing this, the feeling becomes the enemy and in itself becomes stronger.

Cultivate a healthy attitude towards anxiety by considering the following:

Anxiety is a part of me, not all of me and it tries to protect me, it is my body’s defense system. It tries to tell me it feels that I am facing a threat but it can’t tell the difference between a perceived threat and a real threat.

Bring a sense of openness and curiosity to the anxiety, we can be playful and curious and befriend anxiety.

Thoughts are just thoughts, we can become blindsided by worry and anxiety, not just because of the fear feeling but following all of the thoughts that say “I shouldn’t feel this way” or “I want this to go away”. Our thoughts can feed the anxiety and make it bigger and bigger. It is important to remember that we can’t stop the thoughts but we can observe rather than react.

3.Engage in practices that will steady you through exam season

When you are feeling stressed yourself with thoughts of upcoming exams for your child it can leave you tossing and turning at night. Your head is full of thoughts and you are following each and every one of them.Mindfulness allows us to find a new way to respond to your anxious and stressful thoughts, by letting them go and bring back awareness to the present moment.

There are many opportunities to use Self-regulation techniques to help with our fear including breath practices, grounding practices and creative practices.

An example of a breath practice:

The 7:11 breathing exercise calms and focuses the mind, reducing anxiety and stress.

Place two hands on your heart, or one hand on your heart or just leave your hands resting on your legs. The research shows that self-soothing touch reduces cortisol and increases oxytocin.

Breathe in through the nose for 7 and out through the mouth for 11. This is particularly good when you are highly activated. This breath practice is called diaphragmatic breathing or slow breathing. This breath practice was originally developed for fire fighters to help them regulate their bodies as they were doing their work. This breath practice works well with teens and adults.
It is important to note that this is a diaphragmatic breathing technique unlike Mindful breathing where the focus is simply noticing the breath without changing it. When the out breath is longer than the in breath it activates the parasympathetic nervous system which is also known as the rest and digest state. The calming and soothing nervous system that communicates to the body and mind that we are safe. Place two hands on your heart, or one hand on your heart or just leave your hands resting on your legs. The research shows that self-soothing touch reduces cortisol and increases oxytocin.

An example of a grounding practice:

The 5-4-3-2-1 method is one of the simplest ways to calm your nervous system in the moment, especially during high stress seasons such as exams.

Look around and name five things you can see. These can be big or small, for example noticing the light coming through the window or the coffee mug you are holding.
Name four things that you can touch. For example feel your hands in your lap, the fabric of your clothes or even the chair that is beneath you.
Name three things that you can hear.It could be the birds singing, the sound of the washing machine or listening closely to your own breath.
Name two things that you can smell. It can be your cup of tea or a candle.
Finally name one thing that you can taste, maybe a mint in your mouth or a drink of water.

Creative practices are an antidote to stress and anxiety. When you are in “doing” mode" such as planning a meal, painting or gardening it can break the cycle of anxiety and exam stress as we get out of our heads and into our body.
When you step outside and do something you love such as gardening , by feeling your hands in the soil, noticing the textures of leaves, the smell of the earth, the warmth of the sun,you’re anchoring yourself in the present moment. You’re just being and it can be a quiet and restorative mindfulness practice.
When we are anxious and stressed there is a key question that we can practice asking ourselves each day and it is “What do I need”. It is helpful to pause and enquire about how our body and mind feel. To listen deeply and give ourselves what it is that we need to support ourselves. As parents we can resource ourselves with some time out in nature, an early night or less time on social media.

Mindfulness Meditation

Mindfulness Meditation gives you the time out and the deep rest that you need to calm down your nervous system. Meditation helps shift the mental and emotional weight of worry and stress from your mind into your body, providing a sense of grounding and release.

During times of stress, it's easy for anxious thoughts to race, overwhelming your mind and leaving you feeling exhausted. Meditation offers a way to pause and reconnect with your body,helping you step out of the mental loop of worry and into a more centered, relaxed state.

Set an intention to practice consistently for a few minutes each day, the compounding effect of a few minutes a day, builds a healthy habit to support you during this anxious time of being a parent of a child sitting exams. It is helpful to seek the support of a trained Mindfulness coach to help you establish your practice and provide guidance and reassurance.

Here’s how meditation can help you navigate stress:

A)Calms the nervous system

Meditation helps activate the body’s relaxation response, slowing your heart rate and lowering cortisol levels. This physical shift moves you out of the "fight or flight" response and into a calmer, more present state. Your body learns to relax, even in the midst of stress.

B)Reduces Overthinking

When exam stress overwhelms us, we often spiral into overthinking, which can make things feel much worse. Meditation helps to quiet the mind, creating a mental pause where you can observe your thoughts without being consumed by them. This gives you space to choose how you respond to your emotions.

C)Reconnects You to the Present Moment

Meditation anchors you in the present moment, allowing you to release anxiety about the future and exam outcomes for your child. By focusing on your breath or another anchor of your intention such a sounds or a mantra it enables you to shift your attention away from racing thoughts and back into your body, where you can feel more centered and in control.

If you practice consistently overtime you will access a stillness inside you like a mountain, steady and present. The storm of exam season is present but you are the mountain more powerful than this season. When you are in touch with your own inner stillness it becomes an inner strength for you , as our children mirror our emotional states , when you embody the grounded energy of a mountain, they can feel more at ease, too.

As a parent when you’ve done this inner work, practiced awareness, built a healthy relationship with anxiety and practiced self-regulation techniques there is still one more secret ingredient that can often get overlooked and that is self-kindness.

Exam season throws up pressure, doubt and tiredness and as parents we don’t get it right all the time. Being calm all of the time and holding space perfectly isn’t realistic.Often when we get it wrong we can turn in on ourselves and the inner critic is loud. It is so important that we give ourselves some grace.

Self-kindness practices are an antidote to this self-criticism, we can say to ourselves “this is a tough moment and I’m doing the best I can”.

Example’s of Self-Kindness practices

The Be Kind practice allows you to notice the attitude that you are bringing towards yourself. Notice your “self- talk” the words which you are using and replace them with a gentler voice. As you bring this kind attention to yourself you might notice that you need to rest,take some fresh air or have a cup of tea. Or to look after yourself in some way, whatever it is that feels like a “kind action” for you.

Self-soothing touch can be a great way to practice self-compassion. You can experiment with different ways such as using both hands over the heart, two hands over the centre of the heart, cradling your face in your hands or giving yourself a hug. When you physically hold your body in response to difficult emotions it moves your focus out of your head into your body so as not to be caught by the story lines of how you’re feeling.

As parents it is often not what we say but what we do that supports our child.

In summary, as you bring Mindful awareness to your own anxiety, cultivate a healthy attitude towards anxiety and engage in practices that will support you through exam season, you are not only supporting yourself but modelling to your child how to meet exam stress and pressure with presence and kindness.

The sooner you begin supporting yourself this exam season, the more grounded and steady you will feel. These practices build on each other and have a compounding effect for you and your child.

If you need further support with these essential steps

My 1:1 coaching is perfect for you, check out the details here and support yourself this exam season.

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Book if for a chat and let’s discuss how I can support you. It’s time to put yourself on your own priority list and feel calm,centered, grounded, and confident to navigate exam season with ease.

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3 essential steps to support yourself (and your child) through exam season