Monday 29 May

There is no one in the world who hasn’t dealt with stress. Stress is how we react when we feel under pressure or threatened, and it comes in dozens of distinct forms thus anyone can suffer from it.

Like any other intense emotion or feeling, it can often feel like you are alone in it, and as though no one else can possibly feel what you’re feeling. Let me tell you now, the first thing to take away from this post: you are never alone in what you’re going through. Especially when it comes to stress. You may feel like no other person in the entire world’s population of 8 billion people has gone through this before. Someone has. And they’ve been through it and have grown through that process.

Stress is a fierce and potent sensation. Finding a way to deal with it can be incredibly difficult and at times it can lead to burn out due to its overwhelming nature. Point number two: you’ve endured stress before, haven’t you? Stress isn’t a new thing to you. You have had exams every year since the beginning of high school. The exams or deadlines in front of you now (whether you’re taking GCSEs, A-Levels, finishing university or have an important deadline at work) may be the hardest ones yet. But you have done it before when last time felt like the hardest. You’ve been through this before. And this applies to any feeling or dark patch you might have gone through in the past.

Everybody faces stress – some more than others, but the bottom line is is that everybody does. Most of the time, this stress comes from pressure we put on ourselves. We are high achievers. We have always done well and succeeded. We want to do well. Maybe to prove something to our family, friends, society. But most of the time, we want to prove it to ourselves. This is why this stress may seem overwhelmingly profuse. We can’t get away from it because it is us who are the ones putting the pressure on ourselves. Then it becomes a vicious cycle of wanting to relieve the stress but also feeling like we can’t escape the pressure we enact on ourselves.

Whatever stress you are going through right now, hear this. You are enough, you are doing enough. A grade doesn’t shape who you are. I know all too well that dreadful feeling when you don’t get the grade you had hoped for. I didn’t get an A* in the A-Level I thought I had bagged. Did that stop me getting into a top ten UK university? No. Did that stop me creating this amazing community and sharing and teaching and helping others? No. I look back at all those days I spent being sad about that grade and laugh. I didn’t even fail and it felt like I did. All that work felt like a waste of two years.

And perhaps this is the only thing you ever wanted, to get the top grade, to do well, to succeed. Let me tell you that a “good degree” isn’t necessarily getting the top grade. When it comes to a degree, they’re hard enough already! From the hardest courses like Architecture to Sports Science, they’re all difficult. Putting that added pressure on yourself isn’t going to help, and if you’re reading this, you already know that.

I know it’s hard to relieve some of that self-pressure, but you have to put your mental health first. I preach this so much, as you know. We have to stop being so hard on ourselves because at the end of the day, if we continue to put ourselves down each time we believe we have “failed”, we burn out and we fall deeper into the pit of low self-esteem and negative self-talk.

I’ve addressed the idea of failure in my podcast and also here on Pepetoe. Getting an A instead of an A* doesn’t mean you’ve failed (honey, you’re well above an F!). Getting a 2:1 not a first at uni doesn’t mean you’ve failed. We need to change the narrative and stop this negative self-talk and practise being kind to ourselves.

No one is going to say at your funeral “yeah, they were a great person and we loved them so much, but they didn’t get a first in their degree, how bad is that?” Nobody cares! Sure, at this moment your parents may seem disappointed and whatnot. At the end of the day, it’s about making yourself proud. And I know you wanted that top grade so badly, but what does it matter now? The work has been done, exams graded. It’s over. You can finally breathe.

So, during this exam season, take a look at how hard you’re being on yourself. Are you working 24/7? Are you sleeping, eating, having time off? If not, that’s not healthy. Life is all about balance. You can’t expect a car to keep going unless you put fuel into it and take care of it.

I’m not saying it’s bad to set goals for yourself. That’s a good thing, to manifest yourself achieving high grades and to prove to yourself that you can do it. But be mindful of how you are talking to yourself about this goal of yours. Take a step back and evaluate how you are treating yourself. At the end of the day, what truly matters is you and your health, not this stupid socially constructed idea that you need to do extraordinarily well or else you’ll fail. You haven’t failed, you did as well as you could have and that’s way more than enough.

You are enough, and that’s that. Always remember that.