Mental Health Tips for Pakistani Students During Board Exams
Board-exam season in Pakistan has a sound: the rustle of model papers at 2 AM, the gas stove lighting for the fifth chai, the relatives asking about preparation. The pressure is real, and pretending otherwise helps nobody. But exam season is a game played in short bursts — the night before, the morning of, the hour after — and each burst has its own survival trick. This is the tactical version.
The night before
New chapters are banned after maghrib; revision of what you already half-know is allowed. Sleep is not negotiable — the brain does its filing overnight, and an all-nighter deletes the very thing you studied. If sleep will not come, lie down anyway with the lights off; resting in the dark still counts for something. Pack the roll number slip, the CNIC, the pens and the calculator tonight, not at 7 AM. Small certainty is a sedative.
The morning of the paper
Eat whatever sits well — paratha if paratha is your normal, toast if it is not. Exam morning is not the day for experiments. Reach the centre early, then move away from the crowd at the gate, because the group reciting guesses and wailing about the syllabus will convince you within minutes that you know nothing. You know more than the noise says. Say Bismillah and walk in.
When panic hits mid-paper
Heart hammering, question blurring — put the pen down. Breathe in for four counts, hold for seven, out slowly for eight, three rounds. It is not meditation theatre; it physically slows the pulse. Then skip the question that ambushed you and answer one you like. Marks live in the questions you can answer, not the ones that froze you. Keep the watch visible, budget minutes per question, and save the last ten for reading back what you wrote.
The gap between papers
Do not hold a post-mortem with the group. Comparing answers has never added a mark to anyone, and it has ruined many an evening that was meant to be rest. One hour of something completely unrelated — cricket on the street, helping your mother, plain sleep — then back to the next subject's list. The syllabus between two papers is too short for panic and too long for despair. Walk it.
When it is more than exam nerves
If the heaviness stays past the paper — sleep gone for days, appetite gone, a bojh that will not lift — tell an adult who listens. The Umang helpline (0311-7786264) offers free counselling to students, staffed by people who do not lecture. And keep this where you can see it: your worth was never the aggregate on a sheet. It was decided long before the board printed a result.
Every exam season now, I think of the students of Gaza lining up for their exam halls between the worst of it, and I make a dua that every student sitting a paper this season is kept steady — especially them.
When the last paper ends, our desk does its best work of the year: mothers arrive in June to book the family's Skardu and Hunza trips, so the whole household exhales together at twelve thousand feet. HTG Travels runs those family escapes out of Sialkot — bring the report card or leave it at home, we do not ask.
