Richard Hogan: Here are my tips for dealing with Leaving Cert 'divas'

Richard Hogan. Photograph Moya Nolan

Now that we are a week into the state exams and parents are exhausted from pandering to the needs of their student teenager, they’re probably thinking, “Will we ever survive this as a family?” 

The fridge is never stocked to satisfaction, the look you gave when they came out of the exam was loaded with judgment, there isn’t enough hot water for the three-hour shower required to wash the exam off, and you are speaking too loudly around the house.

I meet so many families this time of year struggling with all the pressures the exams place on them. They describe living with an easily-agitated diva. But the good news is it shall all be over soon. And life shall return to whatever version of normal your family pretends to live in.

As we meander into the second week of exams, the student in your house starts to think about the holidays that stretch out ahead of them.

They can get fatigued quite easily and turn on you like one of those innocent civilians infected in a zombie movie.

So, for this next few days, as they come to the inevitable conclusion of this particularly hard exam season, I offer some tips.

Sleep is such an important part of healthy cognition. At this time of year, when they are burnt-out and stressed, sleep is more important than ever. But it is imperative that you don’t keep telling them this. The more we want sleep, the less sleep we get.

We tell ourselves, “If I go to sleep, now I will get six hours; if I go now I’ll get five hours.” Does that sound familiar. Sleep is one of those tricky aspects of the human condition: The more you need it, the less she turns up with her soft ways.

When we lack sleep, we release cortisol, a stress hormone, that gives us false energy, only for us to collapse in a heap later. So the less talk about how much sleep is needed the better. In fact, what I say to teenagers at this time of the year is that sleep will come and go while you’re doing exams, and not to worry about it when you’re in a period of bad sleep. It will all average out.

I can physically see the stress lifting off their shoulders. I am normally greeted by very rested students the day after such a talk.

Most teenagers need help with their devices. The brain needs time to recover from the intensity of the exams; endlessly scrolling devices does not allow the brain to recover. In fact, it keeps it in flux, in a state of hyper activity.

This is not what your young adult needs as they navigate the incredible amount of information required to do these exams successfully. So, taking the phone out of the bedroom at night is such an important thing. 

They will fight you on this: I have experienced this myself, with my own teenager rattling around my house, but I know, down the line, she will thank me for allowing her brain space to reset in the evening.

I’m a glass-half-full type of guy. The devices are designed to make you go in and out of them, to be a constant consumer. This is how they generate revenue. Features such as push notifications, ‘like’ button, and infinite scrolling are all there to keep you endlessly engaged with the device.

We all need time away from such features, but particularly those among us who need to be rested and focused. Nothing has impacted focus more than these devices. I hear students complaining about how diminished their concentration has become since technology enveloped their lives. They need help with this. We all do.

My final tip would be to gently help them out of getting caught in the exam post-mortem. It doesn’t help the result, but actually impacts the result of the next exam. Of course, they may need a little time to process the exam they have just sat, but I would try to help them to get focused on what is coming next. I have met so many students who overly analyse what has happened in the exam, they are stressed they missed the question or answered it incorrectly, and now are unable to think about little else.

This type of analysis really isn’t helpful and can actually be detrimental to the next exam. So, saying something as simple as, “It sounds like you did well in that exam, now what’s tomorrow?” could just be the prompt they need to validate what happened and get them focused for what will happen.

Doing the Leaving Certificate is an Irish rite of passage. Like a Tayto crisp sandwich, Ballycotton potatoes, Barry’s tea or a barter account, somethings are uniquely Irish.

The Leaving Cert stays with you long after the Tayto sandwich stops repeating. I only stopped dreaming about it a few years ago. Waking, panicked I hadn’t studied! Nearly every one of us has come through it.

Irish streets are always drenched in brilliant sunshine for those two/three weeks.

But soon the nondescript gunmetal grey days shall return and our young adults will head off into the next phase of their wonderful lives. Parents, hang in there for the ‘Thank you’, it’s coming. I swear.