Students across the country are fighting a common enemy, and its name is examxiety (exam anxiety). Here’s how to tackle the beast with full colours—whether it’s your first exam or your final!
South Africa (05 November 2024) — From matrics sweating through finals to youngsters just getting their first taste of the study season, there’s one common enemy holding a big chunk of students back from getting the grades they should get. Its name, dare we speak it? Examxiety.
‘Examxiety’, though it might not be an official word, is a very real thing. A combination of anxiety and exams (AKA test anxiety), it’s the unsung force that makes minds feel frozen, tummies turn and twist, and, in many cases, grades shrink.
While regular stress is one thing, “examxiety” is an entirely different beast. Like performance anxiety, it offers a disproportionate response to the fear of failure, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in the process.
Examxiety can manifest in different ways:
- Freezing up and not being able to access the information in one’s mind (getting stuck in between flight or fight)
- Being unable to focus on or comprehend questions like a camera lens stuck in a blur
- Getting physically ill (nausea, shaking or even having a panic attack)
- Uprooting sleep cycles
All of the above can catch someone in a vicious cycle that prohibits them from flourishing in their next exam. And because most exams are so closely packed together, there’s hardly enough time to recover from the first ordeal!
But (thankfully) the story doesn’t end there. While we might not have the answers to those tests, we do have some tips for managing the self-test that is examxiety:
Control What You Can and Recognise What You Can’t!
Things like getting to the test early, giving yourself extra time before you write (not to cram, but to decompress), avoiding conversations about the test if possible and making sure you have a good meal (with enough time for it to digest properly so you don’t have to worry about any stomach noises in-test) are all small, but super helpful ways to remind yourself that you’re a person first and a student second.
Recognising what you can control versus what you can’t helps you avoid any other typical stress-factors that can aggravate examxiety; giving you a sense of being in charge in a time where you can easily feel the opposite.
Make a list if you have to, take no prisoners and remember to be as disciplined with your stress dos and don’ts as you are with your studies.
Separate Yourself from Your Mind
When experiencing something mentally painful, it’s important to put things into perspective. Recognising examxiety as a mental experience—nothing more or less—can help you identify outside of it!
For example, if you were taking your test with an injured leg, you wouldn’t think about your leg being injured the whole time. You know that your leg is a part of you, and the pain it’s going through is just an experience—not your leg’s identity. Similarly, separate yourself from your mind and your mind from examxiety.
When you do this, examxiety seems much smaller than it did at first and much more manageable.
When You Freeze, Remember to Breathe
Breathwork is essential when it comes to managing any form of anxiety! While you might not be able to tackle some breathing methods in a test setting, one you can do when you start to feel yourself freezing up is the box breathing method:
- Inhale for four seconds (slowly)
- Hold for four (slowly)
- Exhale for four (extra slowly)
- Hold again for four
In case of a really bad panic punch, take the deepest breath you can. Just when you think your lungs are as full as they can be, take another smaller breath (without exhaling from the first big breath) to calm down almost instantly.
Presence Over Panic
If you start to panic, force yourself to be present and unclog yourself from getting stuck.
If you think you have enough time, tackle the 5-4-3-2-1 method by identifying:
- Five things you can see
- Four that you can touch
- Three that you can hear
- Two that you can smell
- One that you can taste.
If you only have time to do one sensory activity, pick the one that seems easiest. For example, look for five items that are blue, or see if you can hear five different sounds.
The important thing here is to remember that even if this takes you an extra two minutes or so, those are two productive minutes that are helping you get back to the present as opposed to five or ten minutes unproductively frozen.
Replace Harsh Words with Constructive Criticism
When a tough exam is done and dusted, it’s easy to spend countless hours haunted by it. This can make for a lot of negative or harsh self-talk that can set an uneasy foundation for the next test.
Instead, remember that you control your self-story and your perspective on any given situation.
With this in mind, you can replace harsh words that hinder you with constructive ones that empower you.
“I bet I failed” can become “I discovered something I struggle with that I can work on.”
“It was easy for everyone but me” can become “I might be able to learn something from my friends.”
When you see every ‘shortcoming’ as a lesson, you create a new narrative and roadmap for next time. And that’s a mindset that matters far more than any exam!
Sources: GTG
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