Getting that Positive Linear Relationship between Grades and Mental Health
How to plot your positive correlation graph between your mental health and good grades
One of the funniest memories I have about taking my O Levels happened before my elective Geography exam. My lovely principal, who had just entered the school not two years ago, was observing his next batch of graduating students outside the school hall, and found me and my friend with our hoods pulled over our faces, screaming out statistics of tourism’s impact on the environment. I think it was the look of pure shock on his face that solidified it in my memory. It goes without saying I was particularly stressed out of my mind at that point, having gotten a high C5 for my prelims and with geography being my only humanities subject. But the grade doesn’t matter if you keep in mind that I pushed myself to the brink of exhaustion every day to the point that after my last paper, my brain went ‘Let’s start studying for JC’. (For the record, I went in with the same mentality for my A Levels and barely scraped into the course I wanted in university.)
Of course, I’m not advising you to set aside the books forever; you still need those national examination certificates. Rather, here’s a few things I would have done differently in my journey leading up to the exams to take care of both my mental health and my grades…
Organise Your Time Well
One of the most important things that you need to do in your academic life is to organise your time well. Time is one of the biggest sources of stress in academic life, or rather, the lack of time. Be it your school assigned timetable, or your weekend study checklist, time is every student’s biggest frenemy. But you need to remember to schedule breaks between learning DNA replication and the General Paper “Topic of the Week”! Why not try out the Pomodoro Method, or even the Flowtime Method? Check out what I’ve got to say regarding these effective scheduling techniques here:
Clarify your Doubts
Unmuting yourself in a Zoom call to ask your teacher a question is hard enough in these COVID-riddled times, much less in a lecture hall with 49 (50 is the max pax for these trying times) others. A safer option that I’ve been guilty of using is leaning over (or pulling up Telegram and messaging my friends) to clarify my doubts, and pray that they understand the topic better than I do.
The alternative is to ask your professor, but maybe after the lecture, when you don’t have to worry about all eyes on you. There’s no shame in asking questions, and there are no stupid questions. A tip that I have if you feel more at ease with your friends is to book a consultation with your professor outside of class time so you can learn from your friends’ queries as well!
Socialising, or “E-Socialising’
Home-based learning can seem fun at first, but as it drags on, classes start to feel like your laptop screen and your teacher’s voice blaring out of your speakers when it’s really just an hour’s tutorial. During the circuit breaker, I was in the months leading up to the A Levels, and my only social interactions were greeting my parents in the morning, the occasional answer in a couple of classes, and mealtime dialogue. When I returned to in-person classes, I was so desperate for human interaction with someone who wasn’t family that I barely left my friends alone, and coined our lunches as the ‘Mahjong Table Gatherings’ as we would all sit around a school desk to eat instead of my previous routine of chugging a can of coffee for lunch while keeping my eyes glued to my phone.
Online classes can feel particularly lonely at times, which is why we’re so lucky to have technological advances in communication. With a free Zoom account, you can set up a private zoom call with your friend to study (although for groups of 3 or more, it’s limited to 40 minutes, but you can just start a new one), or you can pull up a ‘Study with Me’ video on YouTube, complete with soothing music. You can even engage in virtual study rooms with strangers through Zoom and Discord, such as StudyStream and StudyTogether, and if you’re looking for peers in a more niche category, such as private candidates for the A Levels, you can always search for it on Reddit — there’s usually a Discord link for you to join to meet new friends!
Thought Challenging
I know what you’re thinking. “WHY would I want to challenge myself when I’m already stressed?” Relax, that’s not what thought challenging is. Thought challenging is defined by the University of Exeter. as a technique to help you reduce the impact of your unhelpful thoughts learn to recognise and challenge your unhelpful thoughts by examining evidence for and against them. Dr Jacqueline Baulch from Inner Melbourne Clinical Psychology teaches us to ask ourselves some ‘perspective questions’ after breaking down our thoughts, and summarise the new perspective.
Through thought-challenging, you work through an ‘I can’t’ statement into the specifics, both the good and bad. Let’s go through an example: “I can’t do case studies for social studies!” Such umbrella statements are immediately demoralising and eventually hinder you in the long run. Let’s compare it with the ‘broken down’ version: “I can identify question types, and I know how to use the PEEL format. I am struggling with choosing relevant pieces of evidence.” Doesn’t that look less scary? Through thought-challenging, you identify specific issues to work on instead of cowering behind the thought that you just can’t do it. While it can be a little awkward at the beginning, the benefits of thought-challenging are definitely worth it in the long run!
Physical Health for Mental Health
The most important thing is to not neglect your health when you’re studying. The Mental Health Organisation UK revealed that our mental health and physical health are interconnected. Nearly one in three people with a long-term physical health condition also has a mental health problem, most often depression or anxiety, and recommend exercises such as play or sport.
Remember to eat and drink water (use a daily water tracker such as Daily Water Tracker Reminder for iPhone or Hydro Coach from Android); you can’t sustain yourself on coffee all day, and this is coming from a business major. Balanced diets with proteins, fats and carbohydrates (and water!) can improve your wellbeing and your mood — it can even prevent and manage mental health conditions such as depression and dementia.
Check-In
How are you feeling? A little better? I know academics can be stressful, and at times, studying can feel like hell. During the national exams, I stopped thinking of myself as a human and just studied, which resulted in me losing weight because I barely ate. There’s a Chinese idiom “废寝忘食”, which directly translates to “fail to sleep and forget to eat.” which describes people who are so hard-working that they don’t sleep or eat properly. Absurdly to me, it’s a positive idiom, used to praise people who are diligent. But what good is extreme diligence and hard work if you’re going to collapse or throw up from stress during the exam itself? Take care of yourself first; only then, can you properly take care of your grades.
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