Feeling overwhelmed? Our psychologist's guide to managing anxiety when everything feels like too much
Let's start with something that doesn't get said enough.
The fact that you're anxious right now -about your exams, about which university to choose, about the idea of packing your entire life into two suitcases and moving to a country where you don't know a single person- doesn't mean something is wrong with you.
It means you're paying attention.
These are genuinely big decisions with genuinely real consequences, and your nervous system is responding accordingly. The goal isn't to make the anxiety disappear. The goal is to make sure it doesn't run the show.
At Lumen, we include dedicated sessions with an in-house mental health specialist in every program because we've seen, again and again, that the students who navigate this process best aren't the ones who feel no anxiety. They're the ones who have learned to work with it. Here's what that actually looks like.
First: understand what's happening in your body
When you're anxious, your brain genuinely cannot tell the difference between "I have to present in front of my class" and "I am being chased by a bear." It triggers the same physical response: faster heartbeat, shallow breathing, tightened muscles, racing thoughts.
This is useful if you're being chased by a bear. It's less useful when you're trying to write a personal statement or decide between Utrecht and Copenhagen.
When anxiety interferes with memory, attention, and concentration (something psychologists call cognitive interference) it makes it harder to think clearly, understand what's being asked of you, and access what you actually know.</cite> Which is why managing anxiety isn't just about feeling better. It's about being able to think properly when it matters.
The good news: there are specific, evidence-based things you can do about this. And none of them require you to "just relax", which, as every anxious person knows, is the least helpful advice in existence.
1. Box breathing: the two-minute reset
Breathing exercises can be a quick win for students feeling overwhelmed. They're easy to learn, take only a few minutes, and can help calm feelings of panic almost immediately.</cite>
The one our specialist recommends most is box breathing. Here's how it works:
Breathe in for 4 counts
Hold for 4 counts
Breathe out for 4 counts
Hold for 4 counts
Repeat four times
That's it. Less than two minutes. Breathing slowly and deeply sends a direct signal to your nervous system that you're safe, and your anxiety can be reduced almost immediately as a result.
Use this before an exam, before a consultation call, before opening UCAS for the first time, before any moment where you feel the anxiety spiking. It works because it's physiological; you're not thinking your way out of anxiety, you're breathing your way out of it. Those are very different things.
2. Journaling: getting it out of your head
Your brain is not a good place to store worries. When anxiety lives only in your head, it tends to circle and grow: the same thoughts repeating on a loop, each time feeling slightly more catastrophic than the last.
Keeping a "worry journal" to off-load stress that a student is carrying is one of the most consistently effective tools psychologists recommend. And it doesn't have to be complicated or poetic or particularly coherent.
Here's the exercise our specialist gives students: set a timer for ten minutes and write everything that's worrying you right now. Not in neat sentences. Not filtered for logic or reasonableness. Just all of it, in whatever order it comes. The university decision you can't make. The exam you think you might fail. The fear that everyone else has this figured out and you don't.
When the timer goes off, read it back. You'll almost always notice two things: some of the worries are real and actionable (which means you can make a plan), and some of them are catastrophic stories your brain invented at 2am (which means you can let them go). Writing them down separates one from the other, which is much harder to do when everything is tangled together inside your head.
3. Challenging anxious thoughts: the CBT approach
One of the most powerful tools from cognitive behavioural therapy, the most well-researched approach to anxiety that exists, is learning to question the thoughts that make you most anxious.
When a thought is making you anxious, try asking yourself: Is this thought actually helpful? Is it a fact, or just an opinion? Could there be another way of looking at the situation? What would I say to a friend in the same position? Is there real evidence for this belief?
That last question is particularly useful. Most anxious thoughts feel absolutely true in the moment -I'm going to fail, I'm not smart enough, everyone else knows what they want and I don't- but they don't hold up to scrutiny. They're predictions, not facts. And predictions, unlike facts, can be questioned.
By stepping back and questioning these assumptions, you can interrupt the cycle of worry.</cite> It takes more practice than breathing exercises, and it won't fix everything in one sitting, but over time, it genuinely changes the relationship you have with your own anxious thoughts.
4. Reframe stress as information, not a problem
Here's something that recent research has found. Students who perceive stress as beneficial, who appraise exams as a challenge rather than a threat, show better exam performance and lower levels of anxiety and depression than those who perceive stress as purely harmful.
In other words: the story you tell yourself about your stress matters as much as the stress itself.
This isn't toxic positivity. It isn't "just think positive thoughts, and everything will be fine." It's a real, measurable difference in outcomes based on mindset. The anxiety you feel before a big decision or a difficult exam is your body mobilising resources for something it recognises as important. That's not a malfunction. That's actually useful if you work with it rather than against it.
Next time you feel the anxiety spike, try shifting the question from why am I so anxious to what is this telling me matters? It won't eliminate the feeling, but it changes your relationship to it in a way that tends to make it more manageable.
5. Protect the basics: sleep, movement, people
This sounds obvious and gets said constantly, which is why everyone ignores it. But our specialist is consistent about this because the evidence is consistent: building structure into your life, including plenty of sleep and regular exercise, is one of the most effective foundations for managing anxiety during high-stress periods.
When you're sleep-deprived, your brain's ability to regulate emotions drops significantly. Everything feels more catastrophic than it actually is. When you're sedentary for days, anxiety has nowhere to go, it builds up with no physical outlet. When you're isolated, worries grow in the silence.
None of this means you need to become a wellness influencer. It means: go to sleep at roughly the same time each night, move your body in some way that you enjoy for at least twenty minutes a day, and spend real time with people who make you feel like yourself. These things aren't luxuries around exam season and university decisions. They're the infrastructure that makes everything else possible.
6. Know when to ask for more support
Everything above is genuinely useful and genuinely backed by evidence. And sometimes it's not enough, not because you're doing it wrong, but because some levels of anxiety need more than self-help techniques to address properly.
If your anxiety is stopping you from sleeping consistently, from being able to concentrate at all, from enjoying anything, or if it's accompanied by feelings of hopelessness or thoughts of hurting yourself -that's a signal to talk to someone qualified to help. Not a podcast, not a blog post, not a friend. A professional.
At Lumen, that access is built into what we do. Every student we work with has dedicated sessions with our mental health specialist as a standard part of their program, not because we think something is wrong with you, but because we think navigating this process properly means having support for the whole thing, not just the parts that show up on an application form.
You don't have to feel completely calm to move forward
One last thing, from our specialist directly: the goal of all of this isn't the absence of anxiety. It's the presence of enough groundedness to keep going despite it.
The students who do best aren't the ones who feel no fear. They're the ones who feel it and keep moving anyway, with support.
That's what we're here to help with.
Book a free consultation and find out how Lumen supports the whole student →
Note: The techniques in this post are evidence-based and appropriate for general anxiety management. They are not a substitute for professional mental health treatment. If you are experiencing severe anxiety or a mental health crisis, please reach out to a qualified mental health professional or a crisis helpline in your country.