How To Deal With Stress

Managing Stress – Key Points

• Stress is a normal part of life and something everyone experiences at times.
• Common sources of stress for prospective medical students include:
• • Examinations.
  • Preparing for the UCAT.
  • Medical or dental school interviews.
  • Financial concerns about funding university.

Maintaining a Healthy Work–Life Balance

• A healthy work–life balance is one of the most effective ways to manage stress.
• Taking regular breaks can improve productivity rather than reduce it.
• Examples include:
• • Walking the dog.
  • Exercising or playing sport.
  • Spending time with family and friends.
  • Pursuing hobbies and interests.
• Returning to work refreshed often leads to better concentration and performance.

Stress in Medicine

• Stress is an unavoidable part of a medical career.
• Doctors often work under pressure, both individually and as members of multidisciplinary teams.
• Learning to manage stress effectively is an essential professional skill.

The PDP Method!!

Preparation

• Anticipate potential problems before they occur.
• Plan ahead to minimise risk.
• Ensure appropriate equipment and resources are available.
• Learn about tasks in advance rather than on the day.
• Get adequate sleep and rest.
• Recognise your own physical and mental limits.

Delegation

• Share tasks appropriately with trained team members.
• Avoid trying to do everything yourself.
• Encourage teamwork and shared responsibility.
• Everyday examples include:
• • Sharing responsibility for organising school events.
  • Rotating prefect duties.
  • Dividing tasks within group projects.

Prioritisation

• Identify which tasks are most important and most urgent.
• Understand deadlines and timescales.
• Recognise that priorities may change as circumstances change.
• Effective prioritisation improves efficiency and reduces stress.

Medical School Interviews

• Stress management is a common interview topic.
• Interviewers may ask:
• • How you cope with stressful situations.
  • Examples of times you have managed pressure successfully.
  • How you maintain a healthy work–life balance.
• They are looking for evidence of:
• • Self-awareness.
  • Resilience.
  • Organisation.
  • Good judgement.
  • Healthy coping strategies.

How to deal with stress for the UCAT

If you're feeling anxious about the UCAT, you're in good company. It's a two-hour, high-stakes test that plays a real role in whether you get invited to interview for medicine or dentistry — so some nerves are completely normal. The goal isn't to eliminate stress entirely; it's to stop it from working against you. Here's how to keep it manageable, from the weeks of preparation through to test day itself.

Understand what you're actually dealing with

The UCAT tests four areas: Verbal Reasoning, Decision Making, Quantitative Reasoning, and the Situational Judgement Test. It's fast-paced by design — you rarely have enough time to answer every question comfortably, and that time pressure is often the real source of stress, more than the difficulty of the content itself.

Knowing this in advance helps. If you go in expecting to feel rushed, it won't throw you off when it happens. If you go in expecting a comfortable pace, that mismatch itself becomes a source of panic.

In the weeks before: build a routine, not a rescue mission

Space your practice out. Cramming in the final week tends to raise stress rather than lower it, because you're constantly reminded of everything you haven't covered. A few focused sessions a week over a longer stretch beats a stress-fuelled sprint.

Practise under real time pressure early. Timing yourself from day one — even if your scores suffer at first — means the pressure of the clock stops being a surprise. By the time test day arrives, working fast will feel familiar rather than frightening.

Track progress, not just scores. It's easy to fixate on a single mock result and spiral. Instead, look at trends over several practice sessions. One bad score is data, not a verdict.

Protect your sleep and movement. This sounds obvious, but it's one of the first things students cut when stressed, and one of the most effective ways to actually manage anxiety. Sleep deprivation and a sedentary week both amplify stress hormones — regular movement and consistent sleep blunt them.

Limit how much you compare yourself to others. Forums and group chats full of people posting elite scores can make ordinary progress feel like failure. It's fine to use them for tips, but be deliberate about how much time you spend there.

Techniques that help in the moment

Box breathing. Before you sit down at the test centre, or during the 1-minute instructions screen between subtests, try inhaling for 4 seconds, holding for 4, exhaling for 4, and holding for 4. A minute of this can noticeably lower your heart rate before a stressful stretch.

Name what's happening. Simply thinking "this is exam adrenaline, it's normal, it will pass" can stop a spike of anxiety from snowballing into panic. The physical sensations of stress and excitement are almost identical — how you label them changes how you experience them.

Have a reset plan for a bad question or bad subtest. You will hit questions you can't answer confidently. Decide in advance what you'll do: flag it, make your best guess, and move on without dwelling. Losing 90 seconds to one hard question is a bigger problem than getting that one question wrong.

Use the practice mode wisely on the day. Most test centres give you a short familiarisation period before the timed sections start. Use it to settle into the interface and the room rather than rushing through it.

Reframing the pressure

A lot of UCAT stress comes from treating the test as a single, irreversible verdict on your future. It helps to remember:

• Most universities use UCAT alongside GCSEs, personal statements, and interviews — it's one input, not the whole decision.
• Score thresholds shift each year, and what counts as "competitive" varies by university and cycle.
• If things go badly, there are usually other pathways — different universities weight UCAT differently, and options like graduate entry or resitting the following cycle exist.

None of this makes the test unimportant. But it can loosen the sense that everything hinges on this one morning.

When stress becomes something more

Ordinary exam nerves are manageable with the strategies above. But if you're experiencing symptoms like persistent sleep disruption, loss of appetite, panic attacks, or a sense of dread that doesn't lift even outside study time, that's worth taking seriously rather than pushing through alone. Talking to a GP, a school counsellor, or a university's student support service is a reasonable and common step — plenty of successful applicants have done exactly that during their UCAT preparation.

A simple checklist for test day

• Know your test centre location and journey time in advance
• Bring the correct photo ID
• Eat something before you go — low blood sugar makes concentration harder
• Arrive early enough that rushing isn't itself a stressor
• Have one calming routine ready (breathing, a short walk, music) for the wait beforehand

Stress before the UCAT is near-universal. The students who do well aren't the ones who feel nothing — they're the ones who've built habits that keep the nerves from taking over.

Interview and Stress

What sort of things might you talk about when responding to interview questions concerning stress?

• I try to respond to the facts of the situation rather than to stress of the situation. That way, I can handle the situation without becoming too stressed. For example, when I deal with an unsatisfied customer in my weekend job, I focus on trying to sort out the task at hand, rather than just becoming stressed.

• My Duke of Edinburgh Award training has really helped me learn to communicate effectively with people in teams, and being able to communicate clearly helps reduce my own stress and also helps reduces the stress of other members of the team.

• As Captain of my school team / leader of the school orchestra / school prefect, etc., I’ve learned to be sensitive to the nuances of group dynamics. If there’s an unhealthy amount of stress within a team, I can feel some of that stress. So, I try to listen proactively to the concerns of the people around me, checking in frequently to see whether they are under stress. If they are, I think about how I can help them with their workload/responsibilities, so the collective stress of the team doesn’t escalate. When the team’s happy, I’m happy.

But, of course, if you’re applying to medical or dental school, then the interview itself can be a stressful experience!

How do I reduce my interview stress levels?
Prepare and be prepared.

• Be sure to research the university course in advance. Know what it is you are being interviewed for!

• Know exactly where you need to go for your interview and work out how you are going to get there.

• Make sure you build slack into your travel time in case your train has been cancelled or there has been an accident on the motorway. Nothing increases interview stress more than running late and worrying you are going to miss your allocated time!

• Practice answering common interview questions. The more you practice, the more comfortable you’ll feel in the interview.

• Avoid negative thinking (“I won’t get this”). Instead, visualise success in the interview (for example, envisage having positive interactions with the interviewer). Do this right before the interview.

• Use relaxation techniques. If you start to feel stressed just before the interview, try taking a deep breath or two to relax. This may help invoke the parasympathetic response.

• During the interview, take a breath in if you are very stressed. This gives you time to compose yourself and prepare your answer.

• Watch your body language and avoid fidgeting. Your body language not only helps convey that you’re relaxed, but it can actually help you feel relaxed. Appearing calm and confident, you are more likely to feel calm and confident.

• Finally, remember that your interviewers want you to be relaxed so that you can give your best. They’re on your side and want you to do well. It can help to remember that your interviewers were themselves once interviewed for a place at medical or dental school – just like you!