Overcoming test anxiety and how to overcome nervousness and anxiety naturally.

Anticipatory Anxiety
This refers to distress experienced while studying and when thinking about what might happen when you take a test. This could make it almost impossible to concentrate and commit facts to memory.

Situational Anxiety
This form of anxiety occurs while taking a test or assessment like an oral or dance exam. This can cause physical distress, emotional upset, and concentration difficulties, all affecting your performance.

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Symptoms of test anxiety vary from person to person. Some students are mildly affected and exhibit few symptoms, while others experience severe reactions.

Symptoms of exam anxiety may include the following:

Before the test:

• Crying easily, feeling irritable, or getting frustrated quickly
• Extreme nervousness, irritability, dread, fear, or hopelessness
• Fear of something ‘bad’ happening before arriving to take the exam
• Drastic appetite changes -  overeating, or skipping breakfast and lunch
• Trouble sleeping the night before

During the test:

• Inability to remember facts that were known before the test
• Excessive yawning (body’s method of increasing oxygen to the brain)
• Upset stomach, asthma attacks, headaches, perspiration, or high blood pressure
• Mock indifference: "I don’t care – this test doesn’t matter anyway!"
• Mind races or feels dull or "muddy"
• Trouble organizing thoughts, feeling confused or panicked
• Trouble reading and understanding questions
• Trouble following directions
• Making many careless errors on a test
• Feeling tension as exam is being passed out
• Physical symptoms: increased heart rate, shortness of breath, perspiring, dry mouth, muscle tension, headaches, vomiting, or fainting
• Negative thinking
• Blanking out on information studied

After the test:

• Feelings of guilt, anger, depression, or blaming performance on others
• Recalling information upon leaving the classroom or a short period later that was blanked out during the exam
• Frustration with grade on the exam despite thorough preparation
• Pretending the test meant nothing, and discard the result as meaningless

Test anxiety is more common than most students realize, and the symptoms are generally the same for almost all students who experience it.

Anxiety is your mind or body’s natural response to what it views as a threat. When threatened, your body triggers a number of physical and mental reactions.

These reactions can be organized into three categories, and when combined, create a state within which test anxiety flourishes. Each category is connected to the other, so anything that can be done to lessen one reaction will lessen the impact of the other two categories.

There are three categories of reactions:

• Physical (somatic)
• Emotional
• Mental (cognitive)

 

1. Physical (somatic)

This is the easiest place to start. These symptoms are the most observable, both to the person suffering with text anxiety and to those around them – the body’s reactions to anxiety are hard to miss!

Common physical responses to test anxiety:

• Changes in body temperature
• Breathing problems (tightness in chest, breathing too quickly)
• Muscular responses (stiffness in muscles)
• Abdominal problems (an upset stomach, feeling queasy, nausea)
• Headache/sensory responses (dizziness, light headedness, blurred vision)
• Cardiovascular reactions (palpitations or tightness in chest, an increase in blood pressure)

There are many other related physical symptoms associated with test anxiety which include skin rashes, changes in eating patterns (eating too much or too little), an increase or decrease in activity level, sleep disorders (insomnia, nightmares, or in severe cases of phobia - night terrors). When a few or all of these responses occur during a test, it’s easy to understand how test performance suffers.

2. Emotional

Emotional responses can include:

• Mood changes
• Emotionally unstable responses
• Feelings of losing control

These emotional factors can literally override other bodily functions and can easily lead to a student avoiding a task completely due to a panic attack or a full-fledged phobia. It is with these reactions in mind that you may ask yourself: “What good is it if I can memorize and learn a huge amount of information, but I can’t remember it during the test because of my emotions?”

The ability to control and normalize emotion is the key to overcoming exam stress.

3. Mental (cognitive)

Mental responses to test anxiety include:

• Irrational thinking
• Feelings of failure or rejection
• Forgetfulness and memory loss
• Loss of concentration and focus

This series of symptoms is due to negative thinking rather than positive thinking taking control in the brain. The result can best be described as students making themselves ‘sick’ with worry due to irrational thought, which then strips them of confidence and leads to an inability to concentrate and focus.

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While anyone can get anxious before taking an important test, people who worry a lot or who are perfectionists are more likely to have trouble with test anxiety. This is because people with these qualities sometimes find it hard to accept mistakes they might make, or to get anything less than a perfect score. In this way, even without meaning to, they put added pressure on themselves. Test anxiety is bound to thrive in a situation like this.

Students who aren't prepared for tests but who care about doing well are also likely to experience exam stress. People can feel unprepared for tests for several reasons: they may not have studied enough, they may find the material difficult, or perhaps they feel tired because they didn't get enough sleep the night before.

Students who experience test anxiety are often masters at avoidance and may also have a problem with procrastination. They often avoid studying, and then a day or two before the test they start to worry that they have not studied enough. Procrastination also leads to last-minute cramming, which can result in the information becoming disorganized in the student's brain.

This pattern of avoidance creates a vicious cycle: procrastination leads to last- minute cramming, which leads to leads to anxiety, which leads to self-doubt, which leads to excessive anxiety during a testing situation, which may lead to the inability to remember or think logically.

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