TRANSCRIPT: How To Reduce Test Anxiety

Presenter: Bitsy Cohn

Test Anxiety: Strategies To Help You Succeed

Hi. My name is Bitsy Cohn.

I am a learning opportunity center director in Colorado, and I am here to talk to you today about testing; specifically, I want to talk about test preparation and test anxiety.

So test anxiety, tell me if this sounds familiar.

“I walked into the test. I knew everything I needed to know. I sat down, my mind went blank. I walked out of the test. I was crying. My hands were sweaty. I was very upset, and I remembered everything.”

Sound familiar?

I’ve heard that so many times in my office from students who have failed, who have come onto the brink of failing that I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that, but too many times, and because of that, I’ve learned a lot about how to deal with test anxiety, and that’s what I’m going to talk to you about today.

Healthy Stress < Anxiety

So what is essentially healthy stress? You know we worry about doing well. We care about how we do.

We have internal expectations that want us to do well when we’re in college.

Why does that turn into what is, in essence, huge fear, anxiety?

And essentially what I tell students, and the easiest way that I can think about it is that fear feeds fear.

You can start off with a circumstance where you are feeling anxious, you’re feeling upset, you’re not sure that you’re prepared.

You’ve got that past experience beating at the back of your mind and saying,

“Oh, you know, you failed this before, you’ll probably fail it again.”

You’ve got some really strong internal messages that are knocking you down, and what happens is that fear comes in and starts to escalate you physically and then it starts to escalate you mentally, and before you know it, you’ve turned into that person who is shaking and can’t think.

And that’s what I talk about when I say “fear feeds fear.”

By the same token -- and this is the good news -- you can also remove some of that fear and stop feeding it, and that’s part of what I’ll talk about with you today.

So another thing I want you to think about in terms of why this anxiety escalates, why it becomes so difficult and so debilitating is because you have a life outside of school, and life intrudes.

If you’re a traditional-age student and you have spent some time maybe with friends and partying a little bit or more than likely you’re having some relationship issues.

Maybe your parents are kind of on you about your grades and you’re feeling pretty stressed about doing a good job, you might have some things that you’re bringing to the test that aren’t exactly study skills.

You also, if you’re a non-traditional student, might have some family issues.

I know students who have young children who are not real predictable and they might have a bad night the night before a test, and what do you do when you have to get up at 6:00 o’clock and head for the testing center or head for your class, and you don’t have a lot going on for you in terms of rest and nutrition and all the things that you need to be present.

I guess the point of all of this is that you need to know that you are a whole person, and the outside life that you live will come with you to the test, and so you need to pay as much attention to the stressors outside of school as you do to the stressors in school.

The Nature of Test Anxiety

Let’s talk briefly about the nature of test anxiety. What is it really?

When I talk to students about it, to keep things simple and try to get the beginnings of thinking about how you can control this, I like you to think about it as two separate entities.

One of them is your psychology, the way your mind works, the way your brain works, the way your emotions work when it comes to being afraid, when it comes to dealing with fear.

The other is physically what happens to you when you have anxiety.

The most simple explanation is that you have a huge adrenaline rush, and that adrenaline causes you to have a physiological response.

When I talk about how do we deal with those things, I talk about them on both of those sides because it’s really important to pay good attention to both sides.

One or the other is not going to fix the problem.

Physical Response

Okay. So let’s talk about that body response.

The thing that I like to tell students is that when you sit down and you start to have this response, you really need to remember that the test is not going to kill you.

Your body, however, doesn’t believe that.

Your body knows that this is the end. It needs to get up and it needs to run.

What you have is a very strong physiological fight or flight response.

Your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up, your large muscles are engorged with blood.

All they’re saying is, “I’m giving you everything you need to get up and run.”

And one of the bigger things that happens for you in a testing situation that makes it difficult to settle down is that your hearing and your eyesight become acute.

Again, if you were the primate that you were a long time ago trying to get out of the forest and away from a predator, all you would need is your eyes, your ears, and your legs, and that’s what test anxiety gives you.

It does not give you your brain unfortunately.

What Do You Do?

Okay. So what do you do?

What do you do when you have that feeling?

You have no brain, your body is ready to run, what do you do?

You could run. You could give up.

I know a lot of students who have been so overwhelmed by these emotions that they have not been able to go back to the test and to do what they need to do.

You could choose to do something entirely outside of what you had for life goal because you’ll let this fear take over.

But I’m being facetious, and I don’t think that’s what you should do.

I think that what you need to do is to understand that you do have the ability to get this under control, but it is no -- there is no magic bullet, there is no way that you’re going to just say, “Oh, I think I won’t have this anymore.”

You need to work at it.

You need to practice.

And you need to try a few really pretty simple strategies, but you need to be really ready with them when you go to the test.

Settle Down

The first of the strategies I want you to be thinking about is actually quite simple, and here’s what I want you to remember, settle down.

You need to settle down.

And what that means is you’ve got to get your body to settle down in two different ways, and the first one I’m going to talk about is breathing.

Your body is escalated to such an extent that you need to get your physiology to calm down.

The simplest way to do that is five easy, deep chest breaths, slowly in and out five times.

No magic, ha-ha, hee-hees like you do in Lamaze, nothing like that.

Just in and out, nice and easy.

And what I’d like to suggest that you do at that time too, is close your eyes and do what I call “go to your happy place.”

Where is it?

What does it look like?

Is it, you know, for me it’s on the beach.

It’s always on the beach, listening to the ocean. Close your eyes and be there.

If it’s, you know, an hour after this test and you’re looking at an A on the top of the paper, go there.

Close your eyes and think about it while you breathe.

Those two things alone are going to bring your body down enough that your brain is going to start coming back on track, and that’s what you need.

Pay Attention

Okay. So the other thing that you can do to help your body really start to settle down, to really calm down is to pay attention to what you’re doing for yourself prior to the test.

The ways that I think that are best ways to pay attention is what are you eating and what are you doing physically?

If you’re eating a lot of sugar, if your morning routine includes Red Bull and other stimulants, any kind of caffeine, you want to look at that.

If you’re an hour out to the test and you’re really caffeine loading thinking it’s going to make you brighter or sharper, I want you to consider that that’s probably not the best choice for you if you have anxiety along with that sharpness, because it’s going to make your anxiety worse.

Also, if you haven’t eaten properly you’re going to have problems.

And one of the things that I tell a lot of students who are more physical, you know, some people like to do yoga, some people like to exercise, is if you can do some kind of rigorous exercise an hour to 45 minutes before you take your test, you’ll be pushing enough endorphins when you walk into that test that you’re going to be able to have a better calming effect on yourself.

You are going to physiologically have a calmer body, so the adrenaline rush you get from that anxiety isn’t going to be as effective in putting your brain off track.

Cut Yourself A Break

The second strategy in dealing with test anxiety includes and involves the psychology, the way that you think, the way that you feel, the way that your emotions are working on you in the test.

One of the strongest things that you can do for yourself to help yourself is to listen to those negative messages that you’re generating walking into the test.

“I’m going to fail this test. I have always failed these tests. I’m really bad at math. Oh, I don’t know if I studied well enough. Oh my gosh, you know, I failed so badly last time, this is just going to be the same thing. I shouldn’t even bother to try.”

These are not unusual messages, and I hear them all the time from students who have this problem.

You need to be willing to stop really, stop talking to yourself in such a negative way.

You need to be willing to raise your own expectations.

“I am doing everything I can today to help myself be successful, and I’m going to do a good job. I am going to do my best today.”

You need to look at that catastrophic thinking. It’s either all or nothing.

I’m going to either fail it or I’m going to ace it.

You need to get out of that mindset and you need to be looking realistically at what you’re ready to do, what you can do, and to a certain extent, you’ve got to cut yourself a break.

You have to be a little bit compassionate.

“I am not going to necessarily do as well as I would like to do because this is a difficult subject. But I am going to do my best.”

It’s going to be a much better message than, “Well, I guess I’ll fail.”

Assess Your Study Skills

The last of the strategies that I’d ask you to think about is your study skills.

Most students will say to me, “I studied for hours. I put five, six, seven, eight hours into my homework. I knew I was doing really well. I knew everything when I came in.”

And I often question that in a more specific way to find out if they really did study as well or as efficiently as they think.

I do not for a minute doubt the amount of time that people put into these subjects because they matter.

They care about them a lot.

But what I do question is how are you studying.

How well are you studying, how effectively, how efficiently is your time used well, or are you just using a lot of time.

My suggestion would be that you ask someone outside of you, someone from your Support Services Center, a trusted tutor, another adult, or another peer who you think is a good student, and talk to them about how you study and see if they have some good suggestions for you about improving your study habits.

The Secret

So now I’m going to impart the secret.

It’s not really the secret, but I like that title. I’m going to impart the secret of test anxiety, conquering test anxiety.

What is really true and what you need to get into your heart is that this is an inside job.

This isn’t about picking the right teacher. This isn’t about picking the right subject. This isn’t about avoiding the wrong subject.

This is about taking a trip inside and taking a look at your own attitudes, your own expectations, your own perspectives and being willing to examine those and change them.

The single most powerful thing that you can do to change test anxiety is to change your mind literally, change the way you look at what you’re facing, change the way you look at what you’re approaching.

Is it a positive or a negative?

Do I have confidence in myself or not? Am I willing to fail in order to succeed? Is it all or nothing?

All of these things are going to make it easier or harder for you to succeed in college, test anxiety or not, actually, it is the secret.

Triggers

Okay. So I want you to do a little exercise with me. I’m going to name some things.

I’m going to name some circumstances in a test, and I want you to think about those things and I want you to tell me, are these things that you have experienced and sort of in your own internal scale of one to ten, are they the things that you identify as major triggers to your test anxiety.

Here is the first one.

There is a student in the class who, every single time he takes a test, finishes first, gets up, does about five minutes worth of letting everybody know that he’s finished by banging his bag around, making all kinds of noise, walking out the door, smiling, waving, talking to people, and he’s gone.

There’s the time when you are going along, you’re concentrating, you’re focusing, you’re feeling pretty good, and the teacher says, “Oh, you know, on question 16, someone had a question about that, and we’re going to change this, this, and this,” and your concentration is blown.

There’s the pencil tapper.

He’s right in front of you, and he taps his pencil incessantly.

He won’t stop and it goes on and on.

There is the air duct above your head that goes on and off and on and off with no particular rhythm.

You can hear it. You can’t hear it. You’re waiting to hear it.

There is the student who talks to her peer next to her, whispers to her.

You know she’s not cheating but she won’t shut up, and you can hear everything she’s saying.

There is the test that was put in front of you that you would swear is not the test that you studied for.

None of the information on the front page looks like anything you thought you had to study for.

Oh, my gosh, what am I going to do? Do any of these sound familiar to you? Are any of these big triggers for you?

What would you identify as the bigger triggers in there?

Ask Yourself

So I’m willing to bet that most, if not all of the examples in our little exercise, are ones that you could identify that are very difficult for you to get past.

There are some that are worse for others.

The pencil taps thing can be maddening for someone, and someone else never hears it.

But what I want to suggest to you is that you have control over some of these circumstances and not others.

And the question I would like you to start getting in the habit of asking yourself is, “How important is it really?”

Not just in the context of, “If I have to listen to that tapping for the rest of the test, does it have to throw me off my concentration?”

But if I’m not able to do my absolute best on this test, is it the end of the world?”

And I want you to start playing around with that idea.

What’s the right perspective that I need to have on this test

If I can’t control how the teacher chooses to write the test, I can control how I choose to approach the test.

But what you want to be thinking about is “What can I do? What do I have control over?”

And then, “If I don’t have control over it, why do I need to be taking it forward into all of this fear. I got to let it go. I have to have an attitude that there are some things I can do, there are some things I cannot do, and you’ve got to be honest with yourself about what those are.

Practice, Practice, Practice

So, to finish what I'd like to talk to you about around test anxiety. I want to encourage you to look at these strategies and to use them, but more than that I want you to practice them.

I want you to practice them a lot because this is not a simple solution.

There are no magic bullets. This is not something that can be taken care of just because you feel like you want to take care of it.

You have to practice.

People who succeed in college who have this issue have also persistence. They have a willingness to continue to try. They have a willingness to make mistakes and to keep moving forward. They have a willingness to ask for help and to advocate for themselves.

My encouragement to you is to not try something once and give up but to try it over and over and over again because I know from a lot of years of experience that this stuff works. But it doesn't work if you don't practice it and you don't use it.

So I would strongly suggest that you take those tools out and use them as often as possible.

And some of the other strategies that you can use really have to do with how you take tests and things that you do to approach a test situation.

What Can You Do Today?

So, you've heard a lot of good information today, I think, about how to be successful when it comes to testing, about strategies that you can use, about ways that you can deal with test anxiety.

And I really strongly encourage you to practice and to try these things. I think that they will help you in your college success.

I would also like to suggest that you work on choosing one or two of these things now, like, right now. Something you heard today that made you think "Well, you know, I might be willing to try that."

Do it today, do it now. Go to school and do it. Talk about it with a friend and see if you can't find a way to make it personal to you to make yourself really use this stuff.

And again, it's not going to be useful to you if you don't take it and use it and we think that if you do use it, you are going to be more successful.

If you're a person who likes to research and who likes to look at more information, we have tons of resources for you to look at and we'd like you to take a look at those and increase your opportunities for success.

Thanks a lot for letting me talk to you today.