If you do one thing this week . . . write away the exam worries

Easter holidays are over, so exam time is looming for many students – and the pressure can start to build. But scientists at the University of Chicago have found a neat little trick to allay those last-minute exam anxieties when the time comes: write about your fears just before you do the actual test.

The researchers found that students who were given 10 minutes to write expressively about their worries about an exam just before they took it tended to perform better than control students who didn’t do the writing exercise.

“[For] those students who are most anxious about success, one short writing intervention that brings testing pressures to the forefront enhances the likelihood of excelling, rather than failing, under pressure,” write the authors in Science magazine earlier this year.