January Mental Health Tips from the Mayor’s Youth Council

Introducing the Mayor’s Youth Council Health and Well-Being Column! Each month, we’ll share fun, relevant, easy-to-follow mental health tips through the Youth Central newsletter, giving you the tools and support to prioritize your well-being with new topics and advice every month!

Understanding exam stress: 

• Natural response to pressure
• Learning to turn and effectively understand stress as not a prohibited emotion, or a sign of something bad, but a potential to grow and learn- reframing approach 
• Recognizing the pressure being put on youth to perform a certain way, but now it is okay to not excel at everything you do as a reality. Don’t allow failure in an area to take away from prior success. 
• Eustress vs distress 

Study Techniques: 

• Active Recall

Plot down everything you know about a subject on a piece of paper, without any form of assistance, then fill in gaps of unknown or not recalled information

• Mind Mapping 

Visualize, and connect relating topics through media such as colors, drawings, etc

Emphasize there is no wrong way to study, it is all part of your understanding and growth as a learner 

Tips To Deal

• Recognizing their stress, is the biggest step in an individual’s journey to address and redefine their stress to their advantage 
  • Identifying controllable and uncontrollable factors 
    • Make a list of what you can control and what you can’t 
    • Ex. Control: Study techniques, time and effort put in, Untrollable: time given, content on test, grading 
    • Remember to not attempt to worry or contemplate uncontrollable factors, as they take away from time you can spend potentially learning the material in depth 
    • What you put in, will come out, 
  • Journal! 
    • Without consideration of writing, spelling, or any aesthetic factors, write, write, write, reflect on what is TRULY stressing you, is it the grade, pressure from family, university? By specifying the cause of your stress you can reflect on its importance to you, and why your body is reacting to this in particular.