How Competitive Exam Preparation Affects Young Minds

The exam is three hours long. The preparation reshapes a young mind for years!

When people ask me what it takes for a student to sit for an exam like NEET, JEE or UPSC, they usually expect an answer about study hours, coaching quality or discipline. My honest answer is different. What it takes, more than anything else, is the ability to hold your sense of self steady while everything around you tells you that one result will decide your worth.

Think about the arithmetic these students live with. More than twenty lakh young people register for NEET each year and compete for roughly one lakh MBBS seats. Over ten lakh aspirants appear for the UPSC preliminary exam for around a thousand posts. A JEE aspirant knows that a single percentile point can separate two students who worked equally hard. No adult workplace asks human beings to perform under odds like these, yet we ask it of sixteen and twenty two year olds, often for two or three attempts in a row.

In my work with students, I see what this arithmetic does on the inside. The first thing to go is usually sleep. Then meals become irregular, friendships grow distant, and hobbies start to feel like a source of guilt. By the time a student reaches a counsellor, the presenting complaint is rarely the exam itself. It is a quiet erosion of identity. The student no longer knows who they are outside of a rank.

What erosion actually looks like, week by week (new section, needs client sign-off)

It rarely arrives as a single crisis. It arrives as a slow narrowing. A student who used to play badminton on weekends stops going, telling themselves it is only for this year. A student who used to text friends back within the hour starts leaving messages unread for days, not out of unkindness but because there is nothing left to say that is not about marks. Parents often describe this to me as their child “getting serious,” and mistake the withdrawal for maturity. It is usually the opposite. It is a young person quietly deciding that everything outside the syllabus has become a luxury they can no longer afford. The tragedy is that this narrowing does not even serve the exam. A mind with no rest, no relationships and no identity outside performance does not retain information better. It retains it worse.

The Data Confirms What Counsellors See Every Day

This is not an anecdote. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report on Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India recorded 13,044 student suicides in 2022, which accounted for approximately 7.6% of all suicides nationwide, and research by the IC3 Institute has shown that student suicides in India have been rising faster than overall suicide trends.

The concern has reached the highest levels of our institutions. In July 2025, the Supreme Court of India issued pan India guidelines on student mental health, directing that educational institutions and coaching centres above a certain size must have trained counsellors and structured support systems in place. When the country's apex court treats exam stress as a matter requiring judicial guidelines, we should stop treating it as a private failing of individual students.

The pressure does not end with selection either. The National Medical Commission's own task force on the mental health of medical students found that a significant share of MBBS students continue to report mental health concerns after clearing NEET. This tells us something important. The problem is not a weak student. The problem is a preparation culture that trains young people to postpone their wellbeing indefinitely, on the promise that things will feel better once they are “in.” Often, they do not, because the postponement itself has become a habit that does not switch off the day the result is declared.

Why the Postponement Never Really Pays Off (New Section, Needs Client Sign-Off)

I have counselled students in their first year of college, freshly selected, who are still unable to rest. The habits built over two or three years of preparation, treating sleep as optional, treating friendships as distractions, treating every unstructured hour as wasted, do not disappear the moment a rank card arrives. They follow the student into the hostel room, into the new syllabus, into the next set of exams. This is why I tell families that the goal was never only to help a child clear an exam. The goal is to help them clear it in a way that leaves them intact enough to build a life afterward.

Also Read: How to Release the Academic Stress and Achieve Better Results without Pressure?

What Genuinely Protects an Aspirant

So what does it actually take to sit for these exams and come out whole? In my experience, four things matter more than any timetable.

An identity wider than the exam: Students who retain one protected pocket of life, a sport, music, a weekly call with a grandparent, cope measurably better. That pocket is not a distraction from preparation. It is the thing that keeps the nervous system regulated enough to study at all. I often ask students to name the one activity they would keep even in their busiest week, and I ask them to actually keep it, not as a reward for good behaviour but as a non negotiable part of the routine, the same way meals are non negotiable.

Permission to have a plan B: The most anxious students I meet are the ones who have been told there is no alternative. Paradoxically, a student who knows the family will still stand by them if the result goes wrong performs with a freer mind. Certainty of love should never be conditional on a rank. This is not the same as lowering ambition. A student can want the result badly and still know that missing it will not end their story at home.

Sleep is treated as preparation, not as its enemy: Memory consolidation happens during sleep. A student studying for four hours is not gaining two extra hours of revision. They are losing recall of everything they studied that day. I tell my students that sleep is the most underrated study technique in India, and I say it as a counsellor, not as an indulgence.

Early, unembarrassed help seeking: Persistent low mood, panic before mock tests, loss of appetite and thoughts of self harm are signals, not weaknesses. Speaking to a counsellor at that stage is no different from seeing a physiotherapist for a sports injury. The earlier a student reaches out, the shorter the road back. In my years at the Thapar Institute Counselling Cell, the students who recover fastest from a bad mock result or a difficult semester are, almost without exception, the ones who spoke up in week one rather than week ten.

Also Read: Top tips to Ace your Medical Entrance Exams in India

What This Looks Like Inside an Institution (New Section, Needs Client Sign-Off)

For instance, at Thapar, this is not left to chance. Our approach rests on the belief that a counselling cell should be visible and normal, not a last resort tucked away for emergencies. Peer support structures, where senior students are trained to notice early signs of distress in juniors, matter as much as a counsellor's office door being open. So does a culture where a professor asking “how are you managing, not just how are you scoring” is not seen as unusual. None of this replaces professional care, but it changes how early a struggling student is noticed, and how early they are noticed is very often the difference between a rough patch and a crisis.

A Note to Parents

To parents, I would say this. Your child does not need you to be a second invigilator. They need you to be the one place where the result does not matter. Ask about their sleep before you ask about their mock scores. Notice when they stop mentioning their friends, their hobbies, the things that used to make them laugh, and ask about those things directly, without turning the conversation back to the syllabus. If your child tells you they are struggling, resist the instinct to respond with a plan. Sometimes the most useful thing a parent can say is simply, “I hear you, and we will figure this out together,” without immediately attaching a revision schedule to it.

And, to every aspirant reading this, please remember that NEET, JEE and UPSC are exams you take. They are not verdicts on who you are. The country needs you healthy far more than it needs you ranked.

About the Author:

Dr. Sonam Dullat is a Counselling Psychologist and mental health expert with over 19 years of experience in psychological counselling, psychotherapy, higher education, research and preventive mental healthcare. She holds a PhD in Psychology and is a Certified CBT Therapist, Certified NLP Practitioner, Certified Mental Health First Aider (Suicide Prevention), and Certified Psychological First Aider. She has presented at national and international forums, including Harvard University, and contributes to research on the use of AI in youth mental wellbeing.