Exams. Perhaps the most stressful time you can endure as an academic. Sure, professional life comes with a different dynamic of stress but you eventually get used to it. But post-exam blues is still something a lot of us are not sure how to deal with.
What can we do to help with that? In this post, we’re going to list some things you can do after the exam time is over to recover from your previous state of mind. But first, we need to understand why we feel the way we do in the first place.
What is Post Exam Blues and What Causes It?
Our mood is completely regulated by hormones. Everything we feel is a direct result of our brain secreting one hormone or other. The sensation of stress is primarily caused by cortisol. If you’re into fitness, you may have heard of this. Too much exercise can cause our cortisol levels to rise.
Coming back to the point, cortisol is associated with the adrenaline rush. When our body goes into fight or flight mode, the brain releases cortisol to go through with it. The same happens when you have college exams coming up.
No matter how hard you study throughout the year, you will feel the jitters the night before. The sleepless nights with hours of research and studying don’t take their toll until after the exam. It’s simply because the brain knows when the source of the stress is eliminated.
And that’s when you start to feel down. All the rush for so many days has left you sleep-deprived and surely in a bad mood. Now, you need to balance out the cortisol level to recover. Hence, our guide to how to recover from exams!
How to Recover from Exam: A Few Helpful Tips
In this section, we’re going to include the tips we believe work best in recovering from exams. These tips are very much open-ended and you can add your own too!
Get Up to Speed with Your Sleep
Chances are high that you haven’t slept properly for the last few days. Even if you tried to maintain your regular sleep cycle, the high cortisol level must’ve hampered your circadian rhythm.
So, the first thing you should do after you’re done with exams is sleep. When you’re sleep deprived, the body stops recovering in important areas, known as sleep debt. And a college student always pays their debts, right?
Clear Your Room of Notes
Where we live and how we live impact our mood big time. If your room is swarmed with notes, maybe it’s time to clean them up. Looking at the notes may remind you of the horror of the past few days and getting rid of them should help big time to recover from the stress.
Take Hot Showers
A hot shower can answer more questions than you think. Maybe it’s the answer to your post-exam stress after all. The hot water cleanses the body big time by loosening phlegm and clearing out nasal passages. The blood circulation also improves as blood thins out at higher temperatures.
It’s best if you can take a hot shower before you go to sleep. Hot showers are already known for improving the quality of sleep. Perhaps you can pay a little more of the sleep debt with a hot shower.
Go Out for a Run
If you’re not into fitness that much, this might sound out of the blue to you. But if you want a healthy life where you can study with all of your focus, you do need fitness. For the time being, go for a walk in the morning or the evening.
The reason we’re only listing a run, for now, is that it helps to produce endorphins, the brain’s feel-good neurotransmitters. It also battles cortisol and balances it out. So, if you’re thinking you’re too tired to go for a run, probably it’s the run you need the most.
Prepare for the Next Semester
You’re still in college. It means the experience you’re going through now may happen again. And you’ll feel all of these emotions again. What if you started preparing right now? We know it sounds counterintuitive to “relax” after the exam but doing so can help you steer clear of a lot of stress in the future.
One of the biggest areas of stress is essay writing. You may be able to go through the entire syllabus in one night but you can’t really fast-track the essay writing process. Why don’t you hire cheap essay writers to take care of the more urgent assignments and lessen the load off your shoulders for a while?
In the meantime, you can catch up with your studies and complete other assignments. If you have less on your plate to chew through, it’s only normal that your stress levels will be lower. And it means no more post-exam blues!
Spend Quality Time
As you were so busy with your studies these last few days, chances are you haven’t talked to anyone properly. So, why don’t you call some of your friends to hang out? Or, maybe take your mom to the movies and spend some quality time. If you have a partner, go away for the weekend.
The bottom line here is that whatever your definition of quality time is, do it. We often get too caught up in our daily lives that we forget to enjoy ourselves. This needs to change!
