Exam anxiety and ways to avoid

It is very easy to view and judge others' behaviors and actions until it happens to us. And when it happens, we become clueless and start responding to the triggers of our mind rather than proactively controlling it.

Exam anxiety is a very common occurrence among higher education students and will almost always cause damage to your confidence, ability and stress levels. There are ways to address this. But before that, it should be identified and consciously acknowledged.

Common symptoms include, inability to sleep, becoming irritable, loss of appetite and continuous engagement into habits such as coffee, smoking etc. Before we try and address these, lets explore the root causes for this. We will take a reverse engineering approach to address this issue.

Exam anxiety stems from fear of failure in an upcoming exam. And drill down further for a reason into this and you will notice that this fear of failure is due to the gaps in your preparation. You have left out some key material that you wanted to cover but could not cover in time.

Your fear is mainly about, what if these areas are covered at large in the exam. Another reason is that you have prepared but haven't prepared well enough or haven't practiced enough. You are able to answer certain questions only if they are asked in a certain way.

If they are twisted, you will not be able to approach. When you dig further into the reasons, why this happens, you will almost always unanimously realize that you knew all along what needs to be done to be in a great shape for the examination but you could not plan for it or you could not stick to your plan and thus you have failed in your preparation.

This is the issue in every case of exam preparation. No single student wants to perform mediocre at exams. We all want to excel and pass out with flying colors. But what differentiates a winner from looser in this journey is about two things. Do you know for sure what needs to be done to excel.

Second, do you have a plan to achieve that? Once you answer these two things, then it is a matter of self-discipline to stick to the plan and the goal is achieved. Apart from preparation part, there are few other personality traits that might cause this anxiety and undue stress.

Those should also be examined and addressed independently as being prepared thoroughly may not help if you have issues in these other areas. These other areas problems stem from your personality in general.

If you are naturally a worrier and always are anxious about things or if you are a perfectionist and get overly obsessed if you cannot meet your bar or if you are facing immense pressure from family and peers etc.

These are more of personality issues that need to resolved through counselling and meditation workshops before you can address the exam anxiety part. If you feel your preparation and ability are meeting the requirement but you are still facing lot anxiety, you need to approach a counsellor and resolve these other issues first. A good place to reach out to is your faculty at your college or any NGO that caters to counselling higher education students etc.

Now that we have identified that majority of the root causes for exam anxiety revolve around planning and preparation, let's examine ways to conquer these. Upon results of each term, every student makes a resolve that he or she will be more committed this time and do better.

However, you end up in the same situation term after term. The reason for this is the plan you have made has not been followed by you and more importantly you have not identified that planned again. A simple framework of Plan, do, check will help this. Always have a self-evaluation mechanism to check if you are on track. You will start with a plan, act accordingly and then check periodically.

If needed, you plan again and repeat this cycle on a regular basis. I personally recommend, you set weekly goals. On everySunday, plan for what you would like to accomplish that coming week. Very important thing is not to over target. Set easily achievable goals to start with and then once you find a rhythm you can start challenging.

For example, if this is the start of a term and you know he syllabus that is at hand that needs to be covered, do a week on week planning every Sunday and work towards it. If you are not able to achieve something planned, plan again to do that in the next week during the next planning session.

This regular self-evaluation will keep you focused and minimize off track occurrences which eventually builds up to a happy place before the exams where all you need to do will be to assimilate all your learnings, revise and practice.

Second most important step is to prioritize your time. In your plan, ensure that of the things you have listed to accomplish, which are needs and which are wants. Learning a new skill is a want but learning some new topic may be a need for the exam. Always try and differentiate these two and take care of the needs ahead of wants.

Third step is to understand the concept of long term memory and short term memory. Memory castle works in a similar style to your desktop. Items on your desktop are easily accessible but comes with limited space. Each time you want to add a new item, you must let go of an old item to make place for the new one.

And when things get moved to a structured folder and you know where it is readily, you will be able to reopen a file easily. This is long term memory. Although you have practiced your planning but did not structure a way to recall and revise what you have learnt, the same book you have studied regularly all through your term will seem new to you all over again.

One approach is to make quick notes or mind maps or index cards on topic you have learnt. Whenever you learn a new topic, visualize the application of this topic. Write down condensed material in a form that you will be able to easily understand. Idea here is to design an efficient recall mechanism.

So, if it took an hour for you to learn a new topic, you should spend not more than 10 minutes to revise this topic before the exam. You will be able to do it only when you have a reference card or something to look back upon and recall all the material.

As the famous saying goes, diagnosis is three fourth remedy. Identify the root causes for your anxiety and address them systematically to get through exams with flying colors. Good luck.