For some young students, January exams beckon. Does putting yourself under pressure to win help get better grades?

Pressure affects your physical responses by increasing adrenaline and preparing you to do your best; your thoughts, creating both positive and negative thoughts, and your emotions, bringing about feelings that include excitement, dread. This triad then affects behaviours.

The amount of pressure a person places on themselves or the amount of pressure placed by others is important, since too little pressure brings little change, whilst too much pressure tends to be experienced as negative, flooding a person with negative thoughts and negative emotions. Unsurprisingly, too much pressure does not help performance.

So, whilst you may want to cultivate a ‘winner’s mindset’ of wanting to do your best, watch out for unrealistic standards, intense application, which is hard to keep up, a demand for perfection, fearful or self-critical thoughts about what it means to ‘lose’, and increased feelings of stress. Instead, focus on a step-by-step plan of what you need to achieve, keep targets realistic, pace yourself, cultivate some encouraging, kind words to say to yourself and focus on getting to your goal rather than the goal itself.