How can I help my students or children when it comes to tackling overwhelm?
Here at Performance Learning, we know that exam periods can be an extremely stressful time for students. Whether students are taking part in mock assessments, coursework, NEAs, GCSEs or A-Levels, stress can be overwhelming. We want to help students when it comes to tackling overwhelm, especially as a healthy mind equals a healthy life.
Trying to fit revision sessions, tutoring slots and independent study alongside school lessons can be really difficult for students. Especially when they are expected to tackle new subjects and huge quantities of content. But Performance Learning, we hear you ask, how do I help my children tackle exam stress and overwhelm?
Fear not, we are here to help! We have been helping learners to overcome overwhelm, whilst also providing them with the tools they need to strive on their academic journey.
It’s easy to see how stress can start to slip in and affect any learner. Here at Performance Learning, we have been helping learners to overcome overwhelm and teaching them the tools they need to strive on their academic journey. Check out our blog which covers a case study of how we have helped a student to flourish in her studies, as well as aiding her in the right direction when it comes to tackling overwhelm.
What can MPL do to help students when it comes to tackling overwhelm?
Although we can’t remove stress and overwhelm from our lives, there are many ways to equip ourselves with the tools to deal with obstacles that may prevent us from staying completely relaxed. This will help students to stay confident when it comes to tackling overwhelm. There are a number of physical and mental processes that can be implemented to help us stay in control of our stress and make sure it doesn’t overwhelm us too much.
Let’s take Nikita, the figure of our case study, and her journey with Performance Learning as an example.
Nikita was doing really well academically, she was self-motivated, keen to learn and get on with her studies. But she would often feel overwhelmed. Her parents spotted this and provided some techniques that would help for a short period of time but then, the overwhelm would creep back in again!
Her parents were understandably concerned, especially as once Nikita progressed up the educational ladder at school, the exams and revision were going to get harder and more intense for her. They wanted to find a solution that would make sure Nikita wasn’t thrown off her academic course.
So, with the help of Performance Learning Nikita started her journey to learn the tools to identify and tackle her feelings of overwhelm. As a first step, we taught Nikita to recognise how emotions were affecting her learning.
Identifying the emotions that Nikita was feeling was a huge step and it can be a challenging one. It was really important during this process that we made sure we took the time to go through the answers and start to really understand what they meant to Nikita. We also looked at different situations when these emotions were felt in school and at home.
Our very own ‘tackling overwhelm’ exercise….
We also asked Nikita to take a look at the chart below and consider the questions as we made our way through the sessions. Nikita needed to identify her emotions. But, before we could start this process, we needed to teach her a little about the science behind stress, anxiety and overwhelm to help her understand the process of what happens at that moment.
Once Nikita understood what was happening when she was feeling overwhelmed, the next step was for Nikita to start to identify her emotions. Both the positive ones and the negative ones. Thinking about being in school and school work, we asked Nikita to answer a series of questions that gave her the opportunity to self-reflect, the questions had no wrong or right answers. This left Nikita open to really understanding what the questions meant to her. First, we looked at positive emotions, then negative emotions.
Emotions Chart
| What is happiness, what does it mean to be happy? | What does anxiety mean? |
| Do you have any positive examples? | What is panic? |
| When do you feel proud? | What is stress? |
| How does it feel when we ‘love’ a subject or an activity? | What does it mean to be overwhelmed? How can I tackle overwhelm head-on? |
| When do we work on gratitude? | What happens when we are angry? |
| What is intelligence and what does it mean? | Are there any times where I’ve found revising difficult? |
| How can I find ways to maintain positivity when it comes to studying? | What are trigger points? |
| What sort of revision techniques will have a positive impact on my learning? | How can I identify trigger points? |
| When do I feel confident and relaxed at school? | Are there any examples of when I have felt a lack of confidence? |
| Which parts of studying do I love? | When do I struggle at school? |
Identifying the emotions that Nikita was feeling was a huge step and it can be a challenging one. It was really important that we made sure to take the time to go through the answers and start to really understand what they meant to Nikita. We also asked Nikita to identify any specific triggers that she found difficult.
What are trigger points?
Trigger points are a series of things or events that have to happen in order for you to feel a certain emotion. At times, trigger points can either make us feel really good about ourselves or make us feel really bad.
Using this information, Nikita moved on to understanding what her own trigger points were through answering a series of questions. During this step, the process of writing down her answers was really important as it gave her a moment to pause and really think about her answers.
Now that Nikita could identify her own positive and negative emotions and she was able to see what her emotional triggers were, she needed a way to make sure she was able to stay positive and stay in control of them. Let’s move on to the final step in the process, in this step we introduced Nikita to her power emotions and her powerless emotions.
What are power emotions?
Power emotions are the emotions that make us feel strong. What do we mean by Powerless Emotions? These are the emotions that we tend to not like feeling and often stop us from performing at our best.
With this knowledge, we asked Nikita to write down her power emotions and her powerless emotions. We also asked her to identify what they manifested as, what they were triggered by and importantly what action she could take to control them.
The results and how we can use them when we begin to start tackling overwhelm….
Through understanding the impact of emotions on her learning and identifying her own negative and positive emotions as well as the triggers they generated, Nikita was able to learn how she could take control and have a clear plan for what to do whenever something arose that initiated a trigger emotion.
After working with Performance Learning, Nikita’s parents have found that she has become able to conduct herself more calmly. At the end of the day, there is no disruption caused by emotional fluctuation and anxiety. Anxieties that were once internalised have been identified and Nikita has the tools to manage them herself! This is a key part of being able to work on tackling overwhelm. It’s important to understand that you can’t always simply brush things off. More often than not, you have to face the problem and fix it!
