Effie Kyrikaki is the founder of NeuroLearningPower® (NLPower), the evidence-based mentoring framework and training methodology that empowers and certifies teachers in their enriched roles as Educational Neurocoaches. As a Master NLP Trainer, coach, and international teacher educator specializing in wellbeing in education, she has supported over 3,000 teachers and the students and their schools to flourish. Her work focuses on Wellbeing in Education through Humane Intelligence, inclusion, and the empowerment of teachers as whole beings. She writes for educators seeking to reignite purpose, harmony and wholeness in their personal and professional lives. Email: effie@metamathesis.edu.gr

 

 

December, the Month of Nerves

In many parts of the world, December smells not of cinnamon and pine but of sharpened pencils and adrenaline. In Greece, Italy, Spain and countless classrooms across continents, the month ushers in exam season, that annual ritual of anxiety where young people’s value feels weighed in marks and numbers.

Elena, a fifteen-year-old in Athens, has been preparing for her English C2 level exam for months. Her teacher knows she is ready; she knows the grammar, the essay formats, the listening traps. Yet, on the morning of the exam, Elena’s mind blanks. Later she says, “It was as if my brain forgot everything. I just froze.”

Her teacher sighs. She has seen this many times. She recognises in Elena’s trembling hands something familiar, the echo of her own teenage panic, the stress her parents carried before their exams, and the tension passed quietly from generation to generation.

December exams may seem a private stress, but neuroscience tells another story: emotions are contagious, and stress, like calm, can be transmitted across classrooms, families and entire cultures.

 

Why December feels different: The Global Exam Month

Across much of the world, December is not only a season of lights and reflection but also of testing and tension. In Greece, Italy and Spain it marks the traditional cycle of Cambridge and Michigan ELT exams, deeply embedded in local educational calendars. In Latin America it closes the school year; in the Middle East it bridges semesters; and in East Asia it often coincides with internal school assessments. Even in the United Kingdom and Ireland, December brings IELTS and Cambridge sessions for international students preparing for university entry.

For many teachers and learners, December has become a symbolic crossroads between endings and evaluations, rest and pressure.

 

The neurobiology of exam stress

When we experience stress, the body’s ancient threat response system activates. The amygdala, an almond-shaped region deep in the limbic system, signals danger, flooding the bloodstream with cortisol and adrenaline (McEwen & Sapolsky, 2022). This response is adaptive for survival but not for thinking.

Under high stress, the prefrontal cortex, responsible for reasoning, language and decision-making, becomes less active (Arnsten, 2015). The result is what Elena felt: brain freeze. Memory recall, linguistic fluency and working memory all decline when the nervous system detects threat.

Research in educational neuroscience confirms that students learn and perform best in states of calm alertness, where the parasympathetic system, our “rest and digest” mode, is active (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2016). This is the same state athletes call “the zone,” and what NLP refers to as the Learning State, a balanced, embodied awareness that supports both focus and relaxation.

Unfortunately, many exam cultures trigger the opposite: chronic arousal, comparison and fear of failure. Over time, this can condition not only individuals but entire communities to associate not just exams but the whole learning experience with stress.

Reflect: What messages, verbal and nonverbal, does your classroom give about exams? How might these shape students’ nervous systems?

 

When stress becomes collective trauma

In Greece, where exams are high-stakes gateways to academic and professional success, anxiety has become almost a rite of passage. Teachers describe sleepless nights, parents rehearse results with their children, and society often equates high performance with personal worth.

This pattern is not unique. In South Korea, the annual Suneung exam is so critical that planes are grounded during the listening section to reduce noise. In the United Kingdom, exam stress is now a recognised mental health concern, with increasing reports of burnout among secondary students (UK Department for Education, 2023).

What connects these contexts is collective conditioning, an emotional inheritance where exam anxiety is unconsciously passed down. This can be understood through the lens of transgenerational trauma: repeated emotional experiences become encoded in family and institutional narratives. When some teachers or parents say, “These exams are key for future,” or “You must not fail,” they often speak from the memory of their own fear.

Neuroscience supports this idea. The brain’s mirror neuron system allows humans to internalise others’ emotional states, especially within close relationships (Rizzolatti & Sinigaglia, 2016). Epigenetic studies also show that chronic stress patterns can influence how future generations respond to threat (Yehuda & Lehrner, 2018).

In classrooms this translates into shared hypervigilance. Students sense their teachers’ and parents’ anxiety, and their own nervous systems mirror it. Over time, this emotional contagion can shape an entire school culture.

Breaking this cycle requires not only new study strategies but a new emotional ecology around exams, one where calm, curiosity and connection replace fear as the dominant atmosphere.

Reflect: How might your own experiences with exams still echo in your body language, tone or expectations today?

 

Reframing performance: From fear to flow

To rehumanise exam culture, we  rewire our collective relationship with stress. This begins with awareness of body, breath, language and belief.

Neuroscience meets NLP in a shared insight: state precedes performance. Our internal physiological and emotional state determines how we access knowledge, creativity and language. As NLP pioneer Robert Dilts notes, “You cannot perform excellence from a state of fear.”

 

Towards a humane exam culture

Neuroscience shows that positive emotions enhance cognitive flexibility and resilience (Fredrickson, 2013). When students feel safe, their dopamine and oxytocin levels rise, improving memory and social connection (Immordino-Yang & Damasio, 2016).

A humane exam culture does not mean removing challenge. It means restoring perspective, recognising that wellbeing and performance are not opposites but allies.

When teachers model self-regulation, when schools create rhythms of rest amid intensity, when parents speak of learning rather than scores, the collective nervous system relaxes. Language changes, posture softens, creativity returns.

 

 

Practice box for teachers – The Chain of Excellence

Purpose: To help teachers maintain presence and grounded confidence, even in stressful exam seasons.

Steps:

1. Stand comfortably and breathe slowly.
2. Bring attention to your posture: feet balanced, spine aligned, body open.
3. Recall a moment of personal excellence, teaching, sport, music, anything where you felt in the zone.
4. Let that memory fill your body. Notice your physiology - breathing, posture and facial expression in that optimal state.
5. Imagine this sense of alignment as a chain connecting breathing, physiology, state and performance as the body, emotions, mind and purpose all lead you to the desired outcome.
6. Before entering class, take one breath and step into this chain.

This anchors the physiology of excellence, helping you project calm energy that students subconsciously mirror.

Educators can intentionally use language that signals safety to the brain. Words like “explore,” “discover,” or “let’s see what happens” invite curiosity rather than judgment. Tone matters too: a slower rhythm, softer volume and relaxed posture help co-regulate students’ nervous systems.

NLP tools, such as anchoring positive states, calibrating nonverbal cues or the Power State that we use at NeuroLearningPower® can support both teachers and students in creating the physiological conditions for flow.

Within the EMBR.ACE framework, this aligns with Awareness, Resilience and Change, building environments where learners feel seen, capable and emotionally supported.

As we enter another December (or any other month) of exams, perhaps our task as educators is not merely to prepare minds for tests but hearts for learning.

Reflect:

How would your students perform differently if they could borrow your calm instead of your stress?

 

A humane call to parents

It has been years since a student in our Learning Centre froze like Elena did. Perhaps it’s because we teachers have learned to take care of our own inner state. Perhaps it’s because our students know how to enter the Learning State, that gentle readiness of body and mind that we practise at the start of every lesson.

But there is something else, a small ritual that brings our community together. A few weeks before the exams, we host a parents’ evening. We share stories, laugh a little, remember how it once felt to sit those exams ourselves. There are home-made sweets, a sense of warmth, and a quiet understanding in the room. At the end, we offer each parent the following letter.

 

Practice box for students and teachers – The Power State

Purpose: To access calm alertness, focus and flow before exams.
Neuroscientific basis: Balances sympathetic and parasympathetic activation, improving memory and focus (Siegel, 2020).

Steps:

1. Have students stand or sit upright, feet flat, shoulders relaxed.
2. Breathing. Ask them to breathe deeply, in through the nose for four counts, out through the mouth for six.
3. Engage peripheral vision. Have students focus their eyes softly on a spot about 2-4 metres away just above eye level. Say: As you keep breathing, focus on that spot over there. As you stare at this spot just let your thoughts come and go, and focus all your attention on this spot. Notice as you stare at the spot that within a few minutes your vision begins to spread out. Allow it to continue to do that. Keep looking at the spot and notice that without moving your eyes, you can now see more to the sides, above and below. Now, pay attention to those things while your eyes stay focused on the spot. Begin to notice that you can see the corners of the room, the ceiling and the floor, all without moving your eyes.
4. Empowering self-talk. As you breathe, say quietly to yourself: “I’m calm. I’m ready. I can think clearly.”
5. Repeat for one minute.

Practising this regularly helps students reset before exams or stressful lessons.

Reflect: What one small ritual could your school introduce this December to help students and teachers alike breathe and remember that learning is not a race but a relationship?

 

Final thoughts

Exam-related stress has long been normalised in educational systems, but neuroscience and NeuroLearningPower® remind us that high performance is born not of fear but of safety, balance, and meaning. Rehumanising exam culture is not idealism; it is evidence-based practice that supports both learning and wellbeing.

As teachers, we have the power to begin this shift, one mindful breath, one calm classroom, one compassionate conversation at a time. In doing so, we redefine success, not as the absence of error, but as the presence of humanity.

 

References

Arnsten, A. F. T. (2015). Stress weakens prefrontal networks: Molecular insults to higher cognition. Nature Neuroscience, 18(10), 1376–1385. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.4087

Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). Love 2.0: Finding happiness and health in moments of connection. Hudson Street Press.

Immordino-Yang, M. H., & Damasio, A. (2016). We feel, therefore we learn: The relevance of affective and social neuroscience to education. Mind, Brain, and Education, 10(1), 3–11. https://doi.org/10.1111/mbe.12076

McEwen, B. S., & Sapolsky, R. M. (2022). Stress and cognitive function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 23(8), 459–471. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-022-00607-6

Rizzolatti, G., & Sinigaglia, C. (2016). The mirror mechanism: A basic principle of brain function. Oxford University Press.

Siegel, D. J. (2020). The developing mind: How relationships and the brain interact to shape who we are (3rd ed.). Guilford Press.

UK Department for Education. (2023). State of the Nation 2023: Children and young people’s wellbeing. London: DfE.

Yehuda, R., & Lehrner, A. (2018). Intergenerational transmission of trauma effects: Putative role of epigenetic mechanisms. World Psychiatry, 17(3), 243–257. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20568

 

Please check the Pilgrims in Segovia Teacher Training courses 2026 at Pilgrims website.