Mental Health: ASMR - Nature's Chill Pill

I was in a stationery shop the other day, just browsing the books, when a member of staff started working on a display stand. It was a tall, rotating stand with compartments for putting different pencils and pens in. She had a large cardboard box containing lots of packets and had to open each one and place the contents into the compartments. As I stood, barely watching, the sounds of her activity began to have an effect on me: I could hear her busily remove a packet from the box, open it, get the pencils out of the crinkly bag and… drop-drop-drop them into the compartment. I could hear her arranging them carefully until they looked right and then return to the box and repeat the process. Ahhh, joy! The inside of my head went ‘mushy’, and I became super-relaxed. I wanted the lady to keep doing it forever and had to pretend I was really interested in the languages section, so I could keep the feeling going without appearing strange.

It wasn’t my first experience of this phenomenon. I have been having this trance-like response since I was about ten or eleven. There is a variety of ways it can be triggered – there’s the passive observance of someone engaged in a task, particularly if accompanied with certain sounds, like the pencil-arranging lady, or someone working on their laptop or someone sorting through their paperwork. Then there are interactive experiences, like someone asking me questions and typing or writing down my responses. After the initial irritation of being asked to do a survey for someone, I find myself taken over by this blissful sensation. And the optician… oh my goodness, the soft voice, the altruistic attention, the questions with writing and typing… ah, I could stay there all day. The only way I can describe it is that it’s a bit like when someone fiddles with your hair or strokes your back, except more than that – I kind of ‘feel’ it too, inside my head.

At this point, most of you can be forgiven for thinking that I’m bonkers. But maybe a few of you might be thinking, ‘Oh my God, yes – I get that too!’

In my early twenties, I talked about this experience with my friends, to see if they had it as well. But after being faced with an expression of ‘the girl’s unhinged’ by everyone, I decided to keep my bizarre pleasure a secret.

It wasn’t until a chance conversation with someone, about 25 years later, that I discovered it’s a real phenomenon, that lots of people experience it and that it has a name – ASMR, or Auto Sensory Meridian Response. Rather like that tongue thing where some people can curl up the sides of their tongue, but others just can’t, ASMR seems to be something you’re either born with or not – you can’t learn how to get the response. (It’s even been described as a brain disorder.)

Wikipedia describes ASMR as the ‘experience of "low-grade euphoria"’, triggered by ‘specific auditory or visual stimuli’ and goes on to describe the various triggers. It also explains that ASMR responses can be elicited via simulation: a video of someone role-playing conducting a questionnaire, showing you their shopping or checking you into a hotel is enough. And YouTube is teeming with every kind of trigger imaginable. The people who make these videos call themselves ASMRtists (see what they did there?) and many of them now make their living sorting out their make-up bags, enrolling you onto a course or being a softly spoken medical practitioner conducting a routine check-up. ASMRtists and their ever-hungry followers call themselves a community and have made their home in YouTube. Now, we don’t have to leave it to chance to get a fix of melty-headed tingles, we can have it whenever and for as long as we want.

This has totally revolutionised my insomnia issues, and I think most ASMR followers use the videos to help them to fall asleep. I usually nod off long before the videos end, only to wake up in the morning with my sleep headphones (a must!) still on. I haven’t taken a sleeping pill in the five years since I started watching ASMR videos. The therapeutic value of ASMR is also acknowledged by sufferers of anxiety and depression.

As you browse through the thousands of videos to find the one that will give you the best response, it’s easy to see the parallels with porn. It is true that, like porn addiction, one can become somewhat dependent upon ASMR roleplay videos. And in the early days of studying ASMR, it was even dubbed ‘the brain orgasm’. It is now widely accepted that whilst highly pleasurable, ASMR is not a sexual response – it certainly doesn’t get me in that way. But humans being what they are do have their favourite genres of ASMR (like porn) and, of course, one of those genres is erotic. For me, I go with pencil sorting and whispered questions!

But there is a flipside to ASMR that many people report. It is called misophonia, meaning ‘hatred of sound’ and, like ASMR, has a set of triggers, the most typical ones being breathing and eating noises (which is also a common ASMR trigger). Someone with misophonia will become enraged or disgusted on exposure to these noises and have extremely negative feelings towards the person making them. I suffer from this, and it really is awful. When I hear someone eating, I feel very angry – I actually want to be violent towards them or scream horrible things at them. The noise they are making is unbearable to me and I can’t understand how they can’t hear it too and not want to stop doing it. For some people, it’s such a serious problem that it becomes life-limiting – going out anywhere or being with anyone carries the risk of being set upon by these dreadful feelings. Some people need to wear headphones to block out trigger sounds. I have improved over the years, and certainly knowing it’s a condition has helped me to deal with it. The person does not deserve my negative feelings, it’s an extreme and incorrect response in me. In other words, it’s my problem, not theirs. I also try to see my misophonia as the price I pay for having the wonderful ASMR feelings.

I feel very lucky that I have this weird condition. It gives me pleasure, reduces my anxiety and helps me to sleep. It’s free and safe. I would never want to trade that.

Editing: The Buck Should Not Stop At The Proofreader

Photo by Sarah Pflug at Burst

Have you ever read a book with so many mistakes in it you wondered whether it had ever been near a proofreader before it was published? Maybe you've felt so outraged that you've submitted a low rating and complained about the poor editing in your review? I hope this little article will explain why this happens and why the reader might just want to hold off from shooting the proofreader!

Think about the last time you did a spot-the-difference puzzle. You were probably told how many differences you needed to find – maybe ten. I imagine the first few probably jumped out at you pretty quickly but then you slowed down as you searched and compared the two pictures, and the last one may have taken you a very long time to spot. Now imagine that you had not been told how many differences there were, or you were given a range, say 5–15 differences. How long would it have been before you gave up finding that last one and decided you'd found them all? Or, if you had found all ten, how long would you have kept looking before you were sure there wasn't an eleventh? And now imagine that you have a time limit with this puzzle...

This is what proofreading is like, only on a massive scale – a novel can contain 140,000 words and hundreds of pages. Proofreaders are trained to know what to do with an error when they find it, and their powers of observation and concentration are excellent, but they don't know how many errors they're looking for and will rarely find everything in the time they have.

Now imagine a different scenario: You've got relatives visiting in three hours, so you've decided to give your house a good old clean, vacuuming, dusting, polishing etc, so it will be spotless. You're stood there, Henry-the-Hoover smiling at your side, when you realise you can't do any of that until you've tidied up all the mess and clutter that's lying around. There are coffee cups to clear away and wash up, piles of paperwork that need sorting, jumbled DVDs and cases strewn around the living room – all manner of stuff that you have to tidy up before you can even think about the cleaning. You set to work, picking up, washing up, sorting out until you're finally able to return to the patiently waiting Henry... but the doorbell goes, your relatives are here, and despite all your hard work, your house is still not clean!

For a number of reasons, a manuscript can be very, very messy. It can be riddled with typos, poor punctuation and spelling, homonyms, formatting errors etc, along with issues that are more of a copy-editing nature, like plot anomalies, clumsy sentence structure, anachronisms and such. But like the untidy house, if a proofreader is spending their time tidying up, they will never be able to clean up in the time they have to complete the job. This is probably the most common reason for books being published with lots of errors, because for every mistake the reader spots in any book, you can bet the proofreader has corrected many, possibly hundreds, it's just that messy manuscripts will have a higher frequency of these missed errors.

Traditionally, a book would go through several rounds of editing: copy-editing, typesetting, proofreading (sometimes by more than one proofreader) and proof collating. But these days, publishers must work to a very tight budget to produce the low-cost books for e-readers. This means cutting out a round (or two) of editing, so often, the proofreader is also wearing a copy-editor and formatting hat. So, not only is the book checked fewer times, but the person doing the checking is undertaking the job of two or three skilled professionals. When you're in copy-edit mode, it's harder to spot that missing quote mark, and when you're in proofreader mode, you might miss that a Renaissance man was looking at a painting by Monet. (Similar happened to me – I had found many issues with the timeline of the plot and corrected or queried them all... except for one. Never fear – the readers spotted it and celebrated their discovery in their reviews!)

There is also the issue that, once the proofreader has returned the manuscript, what happens to it after that is out of their hands. All the careful queries and suggestions may be totally ignored and some of the corrections may even be reversed.

Before I entered the editing profession, I too would have an apoplectic fit if I spotted one too many errors in a text. Now, it just saddens me when I see a negative comment in a review about the editing, and I feel sorry for the proofreader. I know how they take their work very seriously, as they are ever aware of the fact they are only as good as their last gig and that their next job depends on this one. A book that ends up on the shelf still full of howling errors is a culmination of many factors, not just the end-of-line proofreader.

So, if you do want to reach for your laptop to write a roasting critique of the quality of the editing, do please consider that there are more reasons for it being that way than just a rubbish proofreader. A 'could have done with another round of editing' avoids pointing the finger at one person and will make your point perfectly clear.

Have Religious Festivals Capitalised On Our Natural Biorhythms?

Picture by Scott Murdoch at Burst

Call me a miserable old bag but this is not my favourite time of year. 

Yes, I appreciate the beauty of a misty autumnal morning or the warm balmy Indian summers that we enjoy in the UK, but for me, these don't make up for the shroud of darkness that creeps over us as the season takes hold. In fact, it's the shortening days that get to me more than the weather (which can be appalling at any time of year). As sunset times get earlier, so we have to cram all our outdoor activities, like walking the dog, into fewer and fewer hours. Our children trudge home from after-school clubs in the dark. The bike lights and reflective gear come out. The washing lines come down and the tumble dryer wakes up from its summer hibernation and trundles away, adding to the sounds of the rediscovered central heating.

By the end of October, when the clocks go back, the darkness is really upon us, and although we still have a way to go until the winter solstice in December, for me, this is the most depressing time, for which an extra hour in bed is no compensation. In fact, by the time we do reach the shortest day, I'm starting to feel a bit more hopeful, and even those dreadful dark mornings of January hold a tinge of optimism as I know the tide has turned and the light is coming back. 

It seems as if I'm suffering from some kind of displaced seasonal affective disorder until you look at the pagan wheel of the year. The end of October marks the midpoint between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice and is observed by the festival of Samhain. The pagan legend goes that at this time, the Green Man dies and the Goddess, his mother, goes into deep mourning for her lost son. It signifies the start of the dark half of the year and is a sombre occasion.

But the mood changes at the winter solstice, where pagans celebrate 'Yule', the rebirth of the sun, with lights and decorations of mistletoe, holly, ivy and evergreens. It is a joyous time where people get together to eat and drink and exchange gifts to celebrate. Sounds familiar? It is no coincidence that Christians have taken over this occasion for the celebration of the birth of their son and used pretty much all the pagan traditions to do so. I mean, why else would the birth of the son of God be marked by a fir tree covered in lights and shiny things?

And going back to Samhain, the time of mourning the dead, pagans believe that this is a time when the barrier between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, and they hold seances to communicate with the deceased. Unsurprisingly, this is exactly the same time that Christians celebrate All Saints' Eve (Halloween) and All Saints Day: a time where the bond between those in heaven and on earth is honoured. But it is more as a result of the pagan origins that children dress up as ghosts and go trick-or-treating.

This is not the only annual pagan event that Christianity has used for its own end. Easter is the other big one. The word 'Easter' comes from 'Ostara' or 'Eostre', the festival that occurs at the spring equinox in March. It is, in fact, where the word 'Estrogen', the female sex hormone, comes from. Christians celebrate the rising of Christ from the grave, but in fact, it is a time of celebrating the rising fertility of the earth and its creatures. That's what all the eggs and bunnies are about!

There are other pagan festivals that Christians have taken over for their less significant events. Imbalc, in February, marks the first signs of life by honouring the Goddess Brigid, which Christians have made St Bridget. And, of course, we have St Valentine at that time too. Then there is Mabon, a time of celebrating the harvest and making preparations for the winter, that has become the Christian harvest festival. Beltane, on Mayday, which honours life, also appears in the Christian calendar. In fact, of the eight pagan wheel-of-the-year events, Christianity has annexed six!

I'm guessing the reason for this is that at the time Christians were imposing their faith on Europe, most people held pagan beliefs, and it was easier to get them to accept the new faith if it was latched onto existing customs. A bit like hiding peas inside ketchup to get your child to eat them. One can only imagine the political wheeling and dealing that went on amongst the hierarchy of both camps and the obliviousness of the poor people whose lives were affected.

This takeover, I think, has been made all the more effective by tapping into our natural annual rhythms that the pagans illustrate so poetically with their legends. We may not all feel as cheesed off as I do in the autumn, but many of us have a rising sense of wellbeing in the springtime. I think we are all, to some extent emotionally tuned in to the seasonal changes. What better occasions to garner people's spiritual allegiance than when they're naturally inclined to be feeling that way anyway? Clever. Even the times of day that religions like to worship – morning and evening – are the same as those that pre or non-religious people used as a time for reflection, as the rising and setting of the sun were considered to be moments of great significance.

So, as I watch the daylight hours get shorter and race around to get things done before it gets dark and find something for my bored children to do in the long evenings, I look forward to Yuletide, when the sun stands still and then slowly starts its journey back to us, and hope that one day, these beautiful and meaningful events, which already exist within us, will be widely embraced, regardless of faith.

Atheism: No-Afterlife Anxiety

photo by Bruno Passos at Burst

The other day, I took my youngest two children to visit my grandparents' graves. All four of them are interred within metres of each other, bringing into focus what a leveller being dead is. My mother's parents were pretty well-off and lived on the posh side of town, whereas my father's parents were austere, church-going folk who had no time (or money) for unnecessary luxuries. Yet there they all are, lying deep in the ground in close proximity, with just a few words above them to remind the living who they were.

The three of us stood and stared at the headstones; I, as usual, became quite choked up and chatted awkwardly to my grandparents (all of us knowing how silly that was) and cleared away a few cobwebs and overgrown plants. I told my children a bit about them, stared a bit more and then we left. As we were walking away, my daughter started talking about the afterlife and whether I thought there could possibly be one. Really, she knew what my answer would be; she knows that I believe that when you die, that's it, there's nothing else. But, as a near-teenager, she's starting to find that thought unbearable. Most children, at about that age, become aware of their mortality and many struggle to deal with it.

Since then, the subject has arisen several times. She wants there to be more than nothing for herself and other people when they die, she doesn't want it to end as a void of non-consciousness for eternity – the thought is terrifying. It reminded me of my own 'dawning of realisation'.

I remember, quite clearly, the moment I became an atheist. It was like an epiphany, a negative version of the born-again believer’s story of suddenly ‘seeing the light’. I was about twenty-six, lying in bed, doing battle with my recently acquired insomnia, waiting for sleep, my mind working at a hundred miles an hour. And suddenly, the thought just bubbled to the surface.

You’re going to die.

I really didn’t want to be thinking that.

You will die. And when you’re dead, there will be nothing.

It was horrible. I could feel the panic rising in me – like a heat working up though my body.

You’ll be dead. Everyone else will carry on, but you will have no consciousness at all. You will just NOT BE.

There was a pain in my guts and my heart was racing. I wasn’t breathing right.

I didn't know it, but I was having a panic attack. Despite trying not to disturb my sleeping husband, I couldn't suffer in isolation any longer and woke him, saying, 'I'm going to die, I'm going to die!' The poor guy must have been horrified and totally baffled as to how to deal with a hysterical wife in the middle of the night, freaking out because there was no afterlife. I can't remember any more about that night, but that feeling of terror has never really left me and it still keeps me awake at night sometimes. So, if I haven't found any solace, how can I possibly offer any to my daughter?

This, I think, is the number-one reason why people are religious. It is easier, nicer, to believe that we will continue to exist in some way after we die and that our deceased loved ones are somewhere in the ether, looking down on us. It's comforting. There are no such reassurances for the atheist.

The afterlife, to me, is that on death, everything that comprises a body (whether human or other animal) is given back to the earth, the sky, the rivers and seas, from where they came in the first place. All living things are up-cycled bits and bobs from our planet and the universe, culminated into one body for a few years and then given back at the end. They then go on, eventually, to make other things, and that, in my view, is the extent of reincarnation.

There is an aspect of 'living on' after death, in that every living thing leaves their mark after they die. Your great-aunt's special recipe, your dad teaching you how to map-read, your pet dog, whose funny antics and unconditional loyalty contributed to your happy childhood. No matter how short or long a life is, it will always leave ripples which continue to influence and affect the living after death. And, of course, if you have children, and they have children, there will always be 'a part of you', carried by the wonders of DNA, long into the future.

This is all very circle-of-life – lovely and poetic, but it still doesn't offer any real comfort. It's not what we really want to hear. When you hear eminent atheists speak (Richard Dawkins, Ricky Gervais, Stephen Fry), they will wax lyrical about the wonders of life and the universe, of the miracle (scientific, of course) of our existence, and that because of that, and the fact that there is no 'after', we should value life highly and squeeze every last drop of joy from it. But, uplifting as this is, there is nothing of real assurance here that I can offer my daughter.

I encourage her not to change her beliefs just to make her feel better (perhaps I shouldn't do that?) and advise her to try as hard as she can to reject fearful thoughts as soon as they pop into her head and replace them with more positive ones. 

It's not much, but it seems to be the best you can do if you want to stand by your convictions.

5:2 Diet - It's Tough But Easy

photo by Matthew Henry from Burst

When I tell people that I do the 5:2 diet (or 'lifestyle', as 5:2-ers like to call it), the most common reaction is, 'Oh, I could never do that, I would collapse or something!' I find this a real shame because they are passing up what I, along with many other people, have found to be the easiest and most effective way of losing and managing weight. Yes, as the title suggests, fasting days can be tough, but it's the least life-invasive diet of any I have tried and weight loss stops being a wished-for thing – it's practically guaranteed!

A 5:2-er chooses two days a week (not consecutive) where they consume a quarter of their recommended calorie allowance. The other five days, they eat normally. And that's it. There's no special foods or food combining, no constant calorie counting, and for five days in every week, you're not on a diet. Provided you don't go mad on those five days, you will definitely lose weight.

I decided to try 5:2 five years ago. I had been about ten pounds heavier than I wanted to be since the birth of my youngest child. They say those last few pounds are the hardest to lose, and having tried for years (mostly by calorie counting) to shed it, I'd pretty much resigned myself to being that weight for ever. But I'd heard a lot about 5:2 and decided it might be worth a try. One month in, I had lost seven pounds, and after two months, had gone past my target weight. Even a two-week holiday, where I had a break from it, didn't do much harm and it was easy to restart – I'd only missed four fast days after all! For the next few months, I just couldn't stop the weight coming off, and apart from the fasting days, I didn't feel I was making any effort at all. People started to notice a change in my appearance and began to comment that I was looking thin. I just put that down to them not being used to my new look, but when I caught myself in the mirror one day as I was dressing, I could see what they meant. By that time, though, I had lost about a stone and a half and was looking rather bony. I took my foot off the gas for a while and my weight increased a little. I learned from this, and now I'm an ideal weight and tailor my fasting to maintain it.

But my story shows how incredibly effective this lifestyle is. The problem with most diets is that they are untenable – whether that be the latest 'fad' diet or the traditional calorie-restriction diet, you're following it every single day until you reach your target weight. For some people, that could be months and months or even a year or more of doggedly sticking to rules about what you can or can't eat, of feeling hungry most of the time, of wishing you could have that cake. It is practically impossible to stick to; there will be special events, holidays, Christmas and good old-fashioned lapses of willpower that will shove you off the wagon. And once you hit the cheesecake-and-chocolate-and-booze-and-crisps ground, it takes a super-human will to haul yourself back onto that miserable can-only-have-a crumb-of-cheese-every-other-Thursday wagon.

5:2 is not like that. You see the cake, but it's a fasting day. You say, 'Yes! I can have that cake... tomorrow.' Willpower still needed, yes, but at least you only have to wait a few hours. And strangely, when tomorrow comes, you kind of don't fancy the cake anymore. This is because 5:2 eating seems to reset your appetite and the way you think about food. You find yourself thinking, 'Do I really want that?' I think this is partly because you don't want to spoil the good work you have done the day before and partly that your body is not 'needing' it as much. There is a lot of science to back this up, where studies have shown beneficial changes to the pancreas in 5:2 subjects. Many health professionals recommend Type 2 Diabetes sufferers to try this diet (but please note, if you have Type 1 diabetes, 5:2 is not safe).

The other way that 5:2 differs from other diets – and this could be seen as the 'catch' – is that, for most people, there is no end to it. This is why people like to call it a lifestyle. 'No end' may seem very off-putting, but the huge advantage of it is you will never have to lose a significant amount of weight again – no more discovering your summer clothes don't fit you like they did last year or wishing you were a few pounds lighter for your daughter's wedding or desperate, pre-holiday weight-loss plans. In other words, no more yo-yo dieting: months of misery followed by months of putting it all back on again. You can get off that ride for ever. Once down to their target weight, a 5:2-er can maintain it by adjustment. For me, I only fast during school term time and do 6:1 (fast only on one day) unless my weight creeps up, when I go back to two days.  Some people continue to do 5:2 but increase their calorie allowance to 35%/40% on fast days. There are many ways you can tinker with it to make it suit you and lots of literature around to guide you with this. I think of 5:2 as a tool  – if my weight goes above or below my desired range, I use my 5:2 spanner to adjust it!

The 5:2 lifestyle is not, in my view, a fad diet, dreamt up by some (possibly) bogus doctor who's peddling his/her crazy idea to make as much money as possible (and usually cause misery in its failing wake). It was brought to the public domain by renowned scientist, Michael Mosley, who shared his findings on BBC2's Horizon programme in 2012. As far as I know, he hasn't turned his work into a money spinner, although others have made the concept commercial. As Mosely himself points out, fasting is an ancient practice that many civilisations have embraced, not just for religious reasons but because they could see the benefits to their health. 5:2 is merely a simple formula for making the practice accessible to the 21st-century person.

So, if you want to give it a try (please do!), here are some tips to get you started and keep you going:

• Don't be scared of it! I'm not going to deny that you'll find it difficult, especially in the first few weeks, but your body will adjust and get used to it. Feelings of hunger may be uncomfortable but they don't really hurt.
• You can eat tomorrow! This is my mantra. However hungry and weak you're feeling, remind yourself constantly that this is only for one day. You can wake up tomorrow, feel great... and eat!
• Hunger comes in waves. It's ten in the morning on your first fasting day and you're STARVING! You say to yourself that you just aren't cut out for this, you can't do it. Try really hard to hold fire on that doughnut. Go and have a drink (black coffee/tea/water/no-calorie soft drink) and make yourself wait an hour. You will probably find the feelings of intense hunger pass. And you're another hour into your fasting day, well done!
• Plan your food. This is vital for a successful fast day. Do this the day before and make sure you have all your fast-day food ready and to hand. Try to avoid cooking for others (hard when you have children to feed) and get in and out of the kitchen as quickly as you can when you take your meals. Try not to be around food on fasting days and use room-fragrance to get rid of tempting cooking smells.
• Go to bed early. You can significantly reduce the length of a fasting day by going to bed early. You'll also benefit from the extra sleep! You could consider getting up a little later too, although work commitments may prevent this. I usually eat my 'main meal' as late as possible and then go to bed straight after so that I don't go to bed hungry.
• Stay busy. You might think you're too active to consider 5:2 or that you should pick your least hectic days to do it. This is not the case – you will think about your tummy much less if you're busy at work or running around after your children. If you really do have a strenuous lifestyle (not many people do but there are websites where you can calculate your calorie needs based on your activity levels), consider upping your fast-day calorie limit.
• Choose your food wisely. Aim for big bulk and low calorie. Foods with a low glycaemic index are great as they avoid the sugar-spike—slump—craving cycle. I eat loads of very low-calorie jelly, zero-fat yoghurt, zero calorie noodles/rice, tomatoes, salad and a small amount of tuna. 
• Plan eating times carefully. Everyone has their own view about how much to eat at certain times of the day. I prefer to steadily increase my food intake throughout the day: no breakfast (apart from coffee), a tiny lunch, a bigger late-afternoon snack and a 'big' evening meal. This works for me, as by 4:00 p.m., I feel I'm through the toughest part of the day.
• Wake up proud! When you wake up the next day, you will feel so pleased with yourself that you've done it. When you step on those scales, your smile will get bigger. You deserve to be proud – go get some breakfast... but maybe not a fry-up!

Do check with your GP before embarking on any new diet.

Learning the Piano: When Can My Child Take The Next Grade?

photo by Nicole De Khors

It’s a question I get asked a lot:

When can I/my child start working on the next grade?

Getting the timing right on this is very important. It makes the difference between a student loving learning the piano and hating it, embracing the exam experience and dreading it, making steady progress and hardly moving on at all, or even regressing.

Every child develops and learns at different rates. Some just have a ‘knack’ for it, whilst others need to work twice as hard. The range of attainment level/student age that I see in my teaching is astounding. But it’s important to remember that this should be about music making and is not a competition or race to get to the highest grade possible. For me, a grade-one tune played beautifully is far more enjoyable than a shaky attempt at a grade-five piece. Music, and the joy of playing it, should be the priority.

That said, I acknowledge that there is a need, both for personal and academic reasons for formal assessment. I remember taking great pride in doing instrumental exams. But the timing needs to be right so that the exam process is a celebration and confirmation of student attainment, rather than a long uphill battle.

Some students or parents think that going for the next grade will give them something to aim for and make them practise more. My experience shows this not to be the case and can even have a negative effect on the development of skills, understanding and musicianship. I have found that embarking on an exam syllabus before a student is ready results in:

·        Decreased motivation and practising. After the initial excitement and pride in embarking on the next grade, the student quickly finds that they are out of their depth. Consequently, they are unable to do very much independently and need to rely heavily on teacher input. They know that the practice work they have been set is too hard and so avoid doing it.

·        Exam preparation taking too long. Ideally, it should take two terms to prepare for grades one to five. Any longer can be because the student is not practising enough, but is usually because their ability level was not secure enough to start working on that grade. This results in exam prep taking three terms (a year) or even longer. Lesson times are eaten up with painstakingly learning tunes note by note from the teacher and going over the same points week after week. This becomes a real slog for the student and they start to find lessons very boring and practising the last thing they want to do. The outcome is usually a hard-to-break vicious circle of tedious lessons and insufficient practise.

·        Regression of reading skills. The student struggles to read the music and so needs all the notes written down and rhythms interpreted for them. Then, so that they don’t need to read the difficult music, they memorise the pieces. After a year (or longer) of learning to play tunes in this way, the net result, having completed the exam, is that they’ve lost most of the reading skills they were developing before exam work commenced.

·        Supporting tests being compromised: Poor reading skills lead to big problems with the sight reading element of the exam. Worse still, as their chances of getting a good mark for this test are low, there is greater pressure to do better in the other elements, to get an overall pass. Also, as so much valuable lesson time is consumed with learning the pieces, very little, if any, time is left to devote to practising the sight reading and aural tests.

·        Superficial attainment. The student may get through the exam, with lots of teacher input and parental encouragement, but if they have rote-learned the pieces and taken a long time to do so, they are not genuinely at that level. This means that, post exam, even when the student is given easier tunes to play, they find them very hard and take a long time to learn them. A term goes by doing this and then comes the question…

‘When can I start working on the next grade?’

Why does there need to be a gap between working on exams?

Learning an instrument doesn’t work in the same way as some other extra-curricular learning, such as swimming, martial arts, ballet etc., where you move on to the next syllabus as soon as you’ve passed a grade. The next grade up is a big jump and skills need to be developed before the pieces can be embarked upon. The technical elements (scales and arpeggios) for the next grade can be worked on straight away, as you can start from the scales in common with the previous grade and build on. But playing skills must be developed by learning ‘between grade’ pieces. In addition, learning pieces of lower grades is invaluable for speeding up reading, becoming an independent learner, developing musical expression and exploring different musical genres. I also encourage students to learn other skills such as jazz and improvisation and how to interpret chord symbols, as these are essential skills for a musician.

This is a great opportunity for the student to have a say in the types of music they play and to really enjoy music making. I encourage them to make the learning process a collaborative one by offering lots of choice so that they can take ownership of their learning and be the musician they really want to be.

So, how can I tell when I/my child is ready to start on the next grade?

In my opinion, a student is showing readiness to move to the next grade syllabus when they’re roughly halfway between grades, when they can demonstrate a solid ‘skill set’ and knowledge of their last grade and have built on that. This can be determined if the student:

·        Can learn a piece at the grade below the last grade they took (e.g. a grade 1 piece if their last grade was grade 2), with minimal teacher input, in about two–three weeks.

·        Can learn a piece at the grade they last took, with some teacher input in about four–five weeks.

·        Has ‘appropriate-for-grade’ note recognition. The app ‘Note Rush’ is good for assessing this.

·        Can play the scales and arpeggios which were in the previous grade that are still in the next grade and have learned a few of the new scales for the next grade.

·        Has a good pace of progress, demonstrated by learning lots of pieces in between exam preparation and showing evidence of regular, effective practising.

It’s been two terms since my child last took an exam and they’re still not ready. Why is this?

Typically, students take one to two terms between working for a grade exam and so take exams every three to four terms. When it takes longer, there can be several reasons:

·        Lack of practise. This is the most common reason for slower-than-expected progress. It simply is not possible to learn an instrument just by attending lessons. Most of the learning happens at home; lessons offer the opportunity for the student to show what they have learned and to work with the teacher on issues that have arisen in practice and get help with learning the next section/piece. If the home-learning is not done, then lessons become reruns of previous weeks and progress is very slow.

·        Not practising effectively. The most common mistakes students make are:

a) playing tunes through, thinking that this will improve them,

b) playing things they can already play rather than things they have yet to master,

c) not reading the teacher’s lesson notes, which sum up learning points and offer tips and advice.

·        Lack of attention and application in lessons. Attention levels make an enormous difference in speed of learning. The students that make the fastest progress are the ones who give full attention to the lesson. They do not allow other things to distract them and do not distract themselves. They value everything the teacher is saying as necessary for their success and don’t dismiss any learning points as ‘unimportant’ (e.g. getting fingerings or rhythms right). They quietly sit when the teacher is writing in the notebook and continue to listen and focus on the points being made.

This might all sound a bit Victorian, but behaviour such as being distracted, fiddling, interrupting (verbally or on the instrument, or not waiting for the teacher to finish) seriously undermines the assimilation of new skills and information.

·        The work is too hard. Teachers aim to set students ‘doable’ targets to work on at home. This is to foster a ‘can-do’ attitude, boost motivation, promote independent learning and make practising enjoyable and rewarding. If the work is too hard, as mentioned above, it can have the exact opposite effect. This is usually the result of students trying to take exams before they’re ready or of having just slogged through a too-difficult exam.

·        Developmental stages. In my teaching, I do notice that young students go through phases of being able to focus and make excellent progress followed by periods where concentration and motivation decreases and they plateau for a while. A long gap between exams could simply be down to this.

·        Not wanting to take exams. Some students do make good progress but simply prefer not to take exams. Some students simply want to learn for enrichment and are not concerned about how ‘high’ they can get. This is a matter that needs to be discussed with the student, parents and teacher, to establish a clear long-term plan that everyone is happy with.

·        Other commitments/issues. School exams, sporting commitments, starting secondary school, holidays, illness, personal/family issues etc. can all affect a student’s progress, mainly because practising goes out the window. If the student knows that something like this is forthcoming, plans can be made to maintain progress through busy or difficult times.

How can I help my child make faster progress?

It may seem hard to support your child when they’re learning an instrument, especially if you have little or no musical training yourself. But you can make a big difference in their rate of progress by:

·        Helping work out a practice regime. Help your child organise their study time so that practise sessions conveniently fit into their day. Then try to remind them when to practise.

·        Looking in their notebook each week. If they’ve had a ‘well done’, give them praise and encouragement. If you notice that they’re being asked to repeat work from the previous week(s), talk about the possible reasons and make sure you support them when practising.

·        Supporting their practise sessions. This doesn’t mean standing over them the whole time! Have a look in their notebook and specify two things you want to hear them working on. The occasional ‘that sounded good’ or ‘just do that a few more times’ will help them stay motivated and on course.

You should be hearing a few scales and some work on pieces. This means small sections of pieces repeated over and over until they start to sound better. If you are hearing your child playing through an entire piece, you can bet they’re not practising properly. Go back to the notebook, check what the targets are and remind your child what they should be doing!

·        Understanding other demands on the student’s life. As mentioned above, there may be other things that are going on the student’s life which need/have to be prioritised over practising. These demands should be taken into account when forming expectations for taking grade exams and may be a reason for taking a longer gap.

·        Providing rewards. Extra pocket money, a friend coming round, a trip out – whatever will give them that extra push to go and practice!

·        Reading Miranda’s Guide to Successful Piano Practice! Although aimed at students, this is a very useful guide for productive and time-efficient practice, with tips for how long to practise, strategies, dos and don’ts etc. Although aimed at piano students, the advice is relevant to students of other instruments. You can find the guide here.

In short…

I hope that this article has been useful. To sum up, the following points should be considered when planning for exams:

·        A student is ready to start working on the next grade when they are securely between grades.

·        Preparing for and taking an exam before they are ready is usually demotivating, unenjoyable and impedes real progress.

·        The period between exam preparation is essential for students to develop their skills towards the next level and to explore other areas of music and music making.

·        If progress is slower than desired, try to find the reason and address any issues that are affecting the pace of attainment.

·        Support your child in their practice at home to promote faster progress.

·        Remember, doing grades is not a contest. Learning an instrument should primarily be about making music and the personal and emotional enrichment that is gained from it.