You can love a subject deeply and still feel like exams are destroying you. You can work hard, care a lot, and still walk out of an exam room feeling like you’ve failed.

With A-Level Results Day just around the corner, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the pressure, the grades, and the system itself made me question my abilities, my intelligence, and even my love for learning.

This post is about what exams don’t measure, what they sometimes take from us, and how I’ve tried to hold onto the joy of learning and finding hope again, even when it felt like exams were trying to strip it away.

When exams kill the joy of learning 

Exams are supposed to test your knowledge. But what they really test is how well you can stay calm under pressure, recall facts at speed, and jump through rigidly defined hoops.

I’ve had countless moments where I understood the topic deeply and could teach it to someone else, and yet in the heat of the exam room, my brain would just freeze. I would hear every single tick of the clock and it would feel like all my knowledge had disappeared. Sometimes, I’d walk out of a paper thinking, “Maybe I’m just not good enough…” And that’s the part that hurts the most, when something you used to love becomes the thing that makes you question yourself.

You’re not broken – the system is 

The system isn’t designed to celebrate how deeply you understand, how curious you are, how far you’ve come. It rewards neat answers, quick thinking, and often, lucky timing. But being a good learner, a passionate one, goes far beyond what a grade can measure.

There’s nothing wrong with you if you need more time. There’s nothing wrong with you if exams leave you feeling drained, anxious, or like a failure.

What helped me cope 

I’m not a professional. And I won’t lie and say I found the perfect strategy, I still struggled. But I did find a few things that helped me survive, and sometimes, even thrive again. Not everything mentioned below will work for everyone, but maybe something in this list might give you a place to start. 

Talking to People

 This can be your teachers, friends, family members, Samaritans—anyone you trust. Some of the best coping strategies I developed¹ came from conversations where I finally admitted that I needed help². 

You don’t always need someone to fix things, sometimes, just having someone to listen and remind you that you’re not alone³ can make a bigger difference than you expect. Even if nothing about your situation changes immediately, the weights feels lighter when it’s shared.

3 Good Things

No batter how bad a day felt⁴, I made myself write down 3 good things about it. It was always interesting looking back at them, and seeing what I valued and how even on the hardest days, I could still find good things, even if they were something tiny like “looking at a cool hyperbolic curve clock⁵ on a teacher’s desk”.

The point of this exercise wasn’t to pretend that everything was fine, but to remind myself to that good moments can exist alongside the bad, even if they’re small.

Getting Outside (and actually touching grass)

During A-Levels, I’d often try and go for a short walk instead of last minute cramming for the exams. And honestly, those walks did more to settle my mind than any extra revision could. We often underestimate the importance of physical activity, but movement really does help the brain more than we think. Exercising releases endorphins, chemicals that literally make you feel better. 

If you’re someone who tends to overtrain, then schedule in forced rest days. Take it easy. Don’t go all out on the rowing erg or the Wattbike every single time. I get it, pushing yourself to your limits can feel rewarding, but trust me, your body will thank you for the recovery days.

From my experience, being in nature helped me stay grounded⁶. So the next time you feel stressed and the weather’s decent, get outside. Sit on the grass, hug a tree, look up to the sky and the clouds if there are any and just let yourself exist for that moment without needing to achieve anything. 

Volunteering

Whether it’s helping out at a food larder or explaining a Maths problems to a friend, giving something back has this way of making life feel worthwhile. Helping others reminded me that I’m not just stuck in my own head, that there’s a bigger world outside my own stress.

Even the smallest act of kindness can make a massive difference in someone else’s life, and more often that, it makes a difference in yours too.

Hobbies & games (without the guilt)

Recently for me, this has been playing Stardew Valley on Steam in the evenings. But this doesn’t have to be a video game, it could be anything that lets your brain rest.

I used to feel guilty for “wasting time” by playing video games, doing jigsaw puzzles, or crocheting during sixth form. It felt like I should’ve⁷ been revising instead. But it took a great while to learn that rest isn’t wasted time, it’s what keeps you from burning out.

Sometimes, the hardest part is figuring out what actually works. Finding a hobby isn’t always as easy as it might seem, especially if you’re used to (and I certainly am guilty of this) measuring your time in terms of productivity. I wish I had a solution for this myself, but starting with small low-effort and low-commitment things sometimes worked for me. It could a puzzle app⁸, watching a YouTube video on a random topic that seems interesting, or just texting a friend and asking them would like to do some baking.

On a similar note, I’m the kind of person who can go weeks, even months, without reading, and then suddenly spend hours every day completely lost in a fiction book.⁹ Books become a way for me to detach from things and almost live in a difference world for a bit.

The overall idea is to have something that pulls you into the present, where you can focus on nothing but the simple joy of the thing in front of you.

Focusing on What I Can Control

Often during the exam period, my brain loved to obsess over things I had absolutely no power to change: what questions would come up, what other people were revising, what my result would be, etc. Did I find that helpful? No. Did it make me more anxious? Yes.

What then helped was trying (not always successfully) to pull my focus back to what I could control. They were things like trying to sleep and rest to the best of my ability, have a good breakfast, go on a short walk to clear my head if possible. At the end, it’s not about ignoring the things you can’t control, but about not letting them take up all the space in your head.

Finding Balance (or at least trying to)

Key thing is – whatever you do, do it in moderation. Whether that be exercise, gaming, studying/working.

It hasn’t been easy for me, in fact, balance has been once of the hardest things for me to keep. But trying to find that balance, even imperfectly, is far better than ignoring it. Catching yourself before you spiral is a skill anyone can get better at, and the fact you’re trying means you’re already doing something important for yourself.

You’re not alone

If you’re reading this and exams have made you doubt yourself, your passion, or your love for learning, you’re not alone. Regardless of what your brain¹⁰ tells you, even if it feels like nobody else could possibly understand, you’re never alone in this.

Learning is still worth it. And you, regardless of what a single piece of paper says, are capable of thinking deeply, learning widely, and making something meaningful out of this life. You are worth it.

Too often, we find ourselves chasing other people’s definitions of success of what to do in life, or where and what to at uni, etc. But from my experience, the real win is finding something you love and giving yourself permission to keep loving it, even when exams try to make you forget why you cared in the first place. As a teacher once said to me:

“Being successful means finding a way to do what you enjoy doing and doing it well.”

If you ever want to talk or share your own story, feel free to message me or leave a comment below. Because sometimes, it’s not just about the grades, it’s about what they cost. And if you need it, let this be your reminder: you are not defined by a grade, but by the fact that you care enough to keep going even when it’s hard.

I wish you all the best for whatever’s ahead for you. Be that Results Day, a new life chapter, or just finding a little more balance. You’ve got this, I believe in you 🙂

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1. One of which did involve playing cards for the record ↩︎
2. If you’re ever unsure, ask yourself: “How could asking for help ever be the wrong thing?” ↩︎
3. And that there are No Sabre-Toothed Tigers around… ↩︎
4. And as a sidenote- Feelings are NOT facts ↩︎
5. In hindsight, it was a very cool clock – link here ↩︎
6. Metaphorically and literally ↩︎
7. “Should’ve done this.. should’ve done that” – should is a loaded word (in most cases), implies judgement. Try and replace should with could whenever possible. Eg: I could’ve been revising, but I spent that time doing other things. ↩︎
8. I found Squaredle to be helpful with this one! If you literally have nothing else to, give this a go ↩︎
9. I tend to listen to audiobooks when it comes to most non-fiction. The Comfort Book by Matt Haig is one of my go-to choices for this. ↩︎
10. And brains are emotional, not logical. And once again – feelings are not facts ↩︎