Pro Tip for managing Stress in the Last Few Days Before Mains

Feeling anxious in the final stretch before Mains is completely normal, remember, everyone else is feeling it too.

💯The key lies in clarity of goals for these last 5 days.

1️⃣With only 5 days to go, ideally focus on revising the GS and Essay papers now. Trust that the 5 days after GS-4 will be sufficient to revise your Optional.

2️⃣ While Ethics and Essay are high-scoring, spend minimal time revising them. Prioritise other GS papers where content recall matters more.

3️⃣ Best strategy: predict your own set of 40–50 possible questions for each GS paper using PYQs as a guide. Prepare and revise content, and mentally brainstorm intro–body–conclusion for each theme.

4️⃣ Revise important facts, committees, commissions, diagrams, and data that can enrich your GS answers.(you can refer to the MACs for each GS paper for doing so)

5️⃣ If you’ve worked consistently in the past 80 days, generating dimensions for any answer will now be much easier than recalling facts and data, so your focus should be doing that.

6️⃣ For the Essay paper you should focus on structuring as many essays on different themes based on PYQs. The key for Essay paper will lie in structuring one Essay in 15-20 minutes so you should practice that as much as possible.

7️⃣ For the Ethics paper, paper completition is always crucial, to ensure that you must focus on mastery over case study completions within 14.5 minutes. In order to ensure this, you should recall and revise your strategy and course of action+justification for different types of case studies.


Stay calm, stay focused, the last lap is about smart preparation, not overexertion. If you need an empathetic ear in case you’re feeling too anxious or hopeless write at @csetopper_helpline, will try to respond to everyone as soon as possible.