Exam Postponement: Increase Motivation and Decrease Anxiety

If you or your child are faced with the postponement of important exams due to Covid 19, you may be living with a challenging level of anxiety as well as reduced motivation. 

Postponement favours those that are looking for higher points, as well as students that are willing to make an enhanced effort in their work for the next few months.  But for students expecting to be free from exams to spend the summer months relaxing, this extended study time offers extended stress time. The change in circumstances for many, also has the effect of temporarily reducing levels of motivation.  It will take extra effort to push through this emotional frustration and get back to feeling motivated and functioning in optimal exam preparation mode.

When there’s a semblance of chaos surrounding us, it helps to take a step back and look at what we can do to maximise our success. What’s within your control? 

1. Preparation, 2. Motivation, 3. Anxiety.

1. Preparation

Given the extra time, it is possible to take your foot off the accelerator during the Easter break, maybe taking some time to connect with others.

Objectively, the preparation is the same, just the timing is different: 

Students who wish to do well, need to be as proactive as possible in their learning. With reduced face to face teaching time as a given, students need to be exam focused. 

  • Connect with your teachers. Figure out what you don’t understand and ask,

  • Follow a study plan and general teacher advice, 

  • Ensure that you keep the balance right. 

Regardless of any change in the general running of the exams, the age old motto applies: “If you fail to prepare, then prepare to fail”.

2. Motivation

To increase motivation, there’s a couple of tricks that work:

  • Examine your sense of purpose / the why behind what you’re doing. Visualise yourself as successfully completing your exams, noticing your positive emotions associated with this achievement. What then, will your year ahead look like? It helps if you talk through your vision with someone- it acts to clarify our picture, as well as view any potential challenges and make us more accountable.

  • Act and the feelings will come.  It’s easier to work your way into a feeling than think your way into it. By starting, even for 20 minutes, you can get into a rhythm and change your feelings from frustration to acceptance (where you're just getting on with it) and flow (where your brain is thinking about the academic challenge, rather than how you feel about it).  Set a timer and at the end of this time, you will have earned yourself a 5 minutes movement break.

  • Change your thinking. Examine your self talk. Instead of saying “I can’t do this”, maybe try putting the word “yet” at the end of that sentence. Instead of “I’m not very good at math”. Replace this with “If I put effort into anything, I will get better at it- scientifically proven”. 

3. Anxiety

You may not be able to stop yourself from being anxious, but you can choose to feed it or starve it.

A small amount of stress can provide you with the energy needed to get you motivated. Too much can be demobilizing.

 By understanding that it is not something that just happens to us; that we can choose to control it, we can get back in the driver’s seat.

In order to change our feelings, we need to change something about what we are doing or thinking. The easiest of these to change, is what we’re doing. 

By changing what we are doing, our feelings automatically change. Instead of sitting and worrying about something, feeding our negative emotions, we can choose to go for a walk, or talk to a friend. Anything that we do differently, will change the context. But we can also choose to keep sitting in our room, feeling worried. This is our choice.

There have been many studies showing a reduction in anxiety and stress, from regularly practicing mindfulness meditation, so it's worth a try. It involves training your thoughts to be where you want them to be and detaching from interrupting thoughts. You become the master of your mind, allowing thoughts to enter your head, labeling them and then letting them pass. 

Positive Choice Paris offers online, digital positive psychology coaching and counselling:

  • To reduce anxiety and cope with stress,

  • To increase your levels of motivation,

  • To examine your direction in life and make plans for success,

  • To train your mind to detach through meditation.

Get in contact for more details on pricing.

Gráinne Dunleavy, MSc Applied Positive Psychology. 

www.positivechoiceparis.com

Positive Psychology tackles Loneliness during Covid 19 Confinement

Loneliness has more to do with a sense of isolation than just being alone. This can feel quite challenging when your power to resolve the problem, also seems to have been taken away. What else can you do to stay connected, feel empowered and boost your physical and mental health during this enforced confinement period?  Here are some ideas that are based in science that you might like to try.

Keep a Routine

Having a routine helps our body to cope with stress and uncertainty.  The very act of getting yourself ready in the morning; whether this be getting dressed or doing morning exercises helps to support the normal rhythm of your cortisol levels, promoting productive waking hours as well as good sleep at night time. A routine also creates a sense of expectation for the day, which helps us to feel safe and relaxed, which is essential for any higher functioning to take place, as well as stimulating your digestive system at the right times of the day.

Humour

You have probably noticed that laughter is one of those emotions that makes you feel good; producing oxytocin which helps us to be open to connecting more with others. Funny moments from the past that we reminisce with friends can have an equally powerful effect.  Humour and other positive emotions can quite literally open up the blood vessels around our hearts, not just improving mood, but our health as well.

Use your character strength of humour to rewrite your script for its future presentation to your friends. What stories will you be able to share when you come out of isolation? Try to reframe a desperate situation with humour. Picture yourself or a member of your family that you feel safe with, humorously describing the scene. Social media has presented some examples that allow us to empathise, while we laugh out loud such as toasting a glass of wine in front of the mirror.

Opportunity to reset the balance  

Most of us have aspects of our lives that we want to improve - health, fitness, work-life balance, connection with others? Confinement offers extra time indoors, for us to reflect and act in a way that helps us, to get that balance back.  

Once we have a visual image of what we would like our life to look like, we need to ask whether our current actions are helping to make this happen? If not, consider talking to someone about what you are trying to achieve and together set out realistic, measurable short term goals to help you to get where you want. Studies have shown that by sharing our plan, we become more accountable and the likelihood of it happening increases enormously. 

Stay Connected

We all need to work a little harder to meet our social needs during this confinement period.  Depending on your personality and individual situation, you may usually be ok with meeting friends once a week, or once a day. We all have varying levels of social need, but what can we do to meet this?

Online drinks, phone-calls, social media and online games are all means to help you to reach out and stay connected. It can also be helpful to connect with your community; whether through clapping at 8pm for the health workers, or volunteering to do shopping or other errands for members of your community. Developing positive relationships and helping others are 2 ways to boost your immunity, as well as ease that feeling of disconnection at this time.

It’s worth noting that a powerful community spirit has emerged during this pandemic; evident outside your window or balcony, on social media and on the street. There is a comforting sense of unity in our challenge and a level of connectedness, related to this display of solidarity. 

Loving Kindness Meditation 

By practising meditation, you will train your mind to be able to detach from negative  emotions that can spiral, potentially leaving you in a panicked state.  Loving, kindness meditation cultivates a feeling of kindness and positive emotions to yourself and others.  It sounds admittedly strange, but the scientific evidence after 8 weeks of regular practice, shows increases in positive emotions and connectedness towards others, decreases in negative emotions such as anxiety, improvements in vagal tone and the health of our hearts, as well as increases in the pace of cell renewal in our bodies. 

Positive Choice Paris offers online, digital positive psychology coaching and counselling:

  • To reduce anxiety and cope with stress,

  • To explore and increase your sense of meaning and purpose in life,

  • To train your mind to detach through meditation.

Get in contact for more details on pricing.

Gráinne Dunleavy, MSc Applied Positive Psychology. 

www.positivechoiceparis.com

Positive Psychology to support your Remote Business Work

Remote working, when carried out effectively, can offer potential benefits to leaders and their teams; allowing workers flexibility to be able to juggle roles between parenting and working, autonomy over hours worked, lack of commute.  From the employer’s perspective, some of the benefits include attracting a wider pool of potential, globally distributed candidates for future positions and saving money in the leasing of office space. 

The 2 most major factors in remote working being a success for your company include your ability to excel at positive relationships and support an optimistic explanatory style which leads to a growth mindset.

Positive Relationships build Trust and Well-being

Trust should be the cornerstone of your business communication model, both internally, with your employees as well as externally with clients. Trust is required to persuade your client that you will do what you said you will do.  Internally, it is essential that your employees feel valued and safe to be authentic in raising concerns; a requirement for communication to happen.  

Building trust remotely requires new skills and training. This may be something that your company has been modelling on a small scale, but some of your team may be caught on the back-foot. How are you supporting them?

Strong communication within your team relies on having strong interpersonal skills as well as developing a structural framework.  When the face to face model is no longer an option, how can you build that positive relationship and maintain trust?

Positive relationships are an essential ingredient in maintaining our overall health and well-being. During this lockdown phase, many employees are isolated from their team as well as from family and friends.  Leaders who develop ways for the group to connect, will support a sense of belonging within the team, inspiring a level of commitment within the business that is internally motivated. From a health perspective, this connectedness improves the functioning of the vagus nerve, heart, lends itself to character strengths such as curiosity and creativity as well as supporting many other positive health outcomes.

Mindset and Explanatory Style

Whereas those who choose a pessimistic explanatory style, interpret events as permanent and pervasive, optimists will look at the same situation as being temporary and more limited in its effects.  Your explanatory style; how you explain events to yourself, contributes to your mindset; whether you believe that the outcome is predetermined based on presented circumstances, or whether you have the ability to see the opportunity through the cracks. It affects your self talk and determines your vision and corresponding willingness to act, for the future of your business.  

Optimists with a growth mindset will search for the opportunities in a situation and be open and adaptable to finding a way forward. Examples of this include clothing companies making surgical masks and protective clothing or companies that traditionally make vacuum cleaners, choosing to make respirators. This enhances their brand and we support them. 

The question is not whether your skill-set fits this new situation, but what can you and your business contribute to this event? What do people need right now and how can you help them to access this?

What makes some companies more resilient is that instead of pressing the panic button and potentially creating a negative legacy for their brand name, they take a moment to take stock. What is your company’s vision for surviving this adverse time? What are the skills that you and your team need to thrive? How are they going to attain them?

Positive Choice Paris provides remote coaching for businesses:

  • to develop interpersonal skills that enhance relationships and build trust.

  • to combat stress and anxiety and increase well-being

  • To develop an optimistic explanatory style, growth mindset and build resilience

Get in contact for more details on pricing.

Gráinne Dunleavy, MSc Applied Positive Psychology. 

www.positivechoiceparis.com

Working from Home while minding kids

Firstly try to be kind to yourself. It’s not an easy task to take on homeschooling, minding young children, cleaning and cooking, on top of working from home. It is not just a case of adding extra duties - it also changes the dynamic of your relationships, so give yourself a break. 

Being prepared is the best way to get on top of juggling this multiple role challenge.  Think about managing your space, creating a routine and being ready with busy activities for meetings.

Keep expectations realistic

Talk with your line manager about what you need to make this work. It may be that you can set up more flexible working times, meeting times or perhaps even reduce your work-load.  If your goals are realistic, you can do this well.

Set up a safe space

Younger children that you are supervising will need to be in the same room as you, so set up your office in a designated corner of the room. It helps if you keep this corner exclusively as a workstation, as this will help to focus your attention. It may also help if your body is facing towards your children; that you only need to raise your head to determine that they are ok.

Create a Routine

Have your kids stick to a routine in which they have set times to get up, nap, have quiet time, eat, do homework, exercise and go to bed. They feel secure by the structure and it also safeguards your time to take meetings or work. 

 How to take a meeting with younger children: 

  • Where possible line up activities that need your full concentration, including important meetings for during nap time, quiet time, or bed time.

  • If they are awake, you’re realistically looking at busy time for younger children. Choose between your child’s affinity activity (eg if they can play with their cars, lego, dolls for long periods alone) or screen time (give them a list of ok activities that they can choose from on their device or set something to watch on tv.

  • Create a physical barrier (chair or stool works well) between you and your children. This stops them from continuously entering your space, especially during a video call. 

  • Try using the mute button on calls, while you’re not speaking. This cuts down on the noise being received from the other end.

  • Choose a headset with an attached microphone, that has noise cancelling features.

Home schooling

Set up their workstation near yours and offer them earphones if they are taking a digital class. Ideally their desk would be facing the wall so that you can see over their shoulder, what they are doing. 

Encourage them to try everything first before asking a question. For children that are constantly interrupting you with homework questions, it’s worth having a set time to work with them, so that they can get the help that they need.

If it all goes terribly wrong, don’t panic. This is an exceptional time and everybody homeschooling is in the same boat. Try not to damage your relationship with your child during this temporary phase.  All students are in the same predicament and teachers will manage that when they go back to school. The most important thing is that you and your kids are safe and remain mentally and physically healthy. 

If you want to talk with me about what’s going on for you personally, please get in contact. 

Gráinne Dunleavy, MSc Positive Psychology. 

Staying healthy means more than just avoiding the Corona virus. Top 3 Positive Psychology tips to stay healthy when your area is in lockdown.

China and Italy are seeing a rising number of anxiety cases among populations that have been in lockdown mode in order to slow down the spread of the Corona virus pandemic and help avoid pass on the infection to others that are more vulnerable. But what about the need to keep people healthy? Isolation has been linked to depression and a list of mental health issues. But little or no advice on how to stay healthy is being given to those people who are told to go home and avoid social contact.

Here are some tips for you to consider if you have been told to work from home.

  1. Connect

Why? We are social creatures and have a need to connect for our emotional wellbeing. We each have a minimum amount that we need to connect before we start cracking up. The only way for recent regulations to be sustainable for the coming weeks is to offer people safe ways to connect.

How? Consider first the quality of those connections that you will continue to make on a daily basis. Some of these may be negative and difficult to navigate. We can’t change the behaviour of others, but luckily when we change what we are doing, the relationship changes. Talk through with someone you trust, a way to better navigate conflict.

Following recommendations for a metre distance with others and regularly washing hands, having coffee with a friend, going for a walk or doing an activity together may actually keep your vagus nerve healthy and your overall immunity strong.

Safer still but with reduced need satisfaction- Skyping, FaceTiming a friend, family member or calling on the phone allows you to sustain a level of contact that will help you to meet this basic need.

2. Exercise

Exercise produces endorphins that boost your mood as well as improving your physical health (6).  Walking, running or cycling are among the many activities that help to get your heart going and help your immunity . Or maybe now is the time to check out some yoga online videos, dance around your house, or seek out that Just Dance game.

3. Flow

Flow is a state of wellbeing where you are deeply engaged in an activity, to the degree that you are not thinking about anything else. It is a state that creates optimal performance, in which the mind and body are engaged at a level that challenges, but comfortably develops the skills of the individual. Think about a moment where you were playing an instrument, drawing, reading, playing soccer, delivering a speech and for a moment, you lost a sense of time and the world outside of what you were doing. This state boosts your health and can be achieved in a safe way, with your choosing. Half an hour of flow activity per day will help boost your happiness and keep you sane during this exceptional time. 

Please note: If you are immune deficient, have an autoimmune disease, or are at a vulnerable age, please pay careful attention to the advice of your doctor.

If you want to talk about any of these suggestions, or wish to add to this brief list, please contact me. 

Gráinne Dunleavy MSc Positive Psychology 

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