Exam Guidance 2023.Joe’s Jotter: Practical Techniques to Help Those who get ‘Exam Anxious’
If the thoughts of sitting exams fill you with dread, the more aids you
have to draw on, the better chance you will settle and remain calm in
the exam hall. The following are five anti-anxiety techniques that will
help you maintain your zen on the day. Try them!!!
1. Visualise what you need to do: Visualisation is a technique often
used to reduce anxiety. In this context, a few days prior to the exam,
close your eyes and imagine yourself sitting in the exam hall. You need
to picture yourself going into the hall feeling calm and confident in your
ability. Imagine sitting down to read the paper and your mind going
into a highly focused state and completing the paper full of confidence
with many of the topics that you have prepared appearing on it. Imagine
putting your points across on your answer book in a clear manner and
being really content with your efforts made at the end. In general, you
are visualising yourself doing well on an exam paper you are concerned
about. You should reapply this technique then just before you actually
enter the exam hall.
This technique utilises and links with positive thinking. If you go into
a football game, for example, thinking you will at best draw with your
opponent, the majority of the time a draw will be the best result you
will achieve. In other words, you have almost convinced yourself that
you will not win this game. If you imagine you are going to do well in
anything, you have a much better chance of succeeding in it. I am a
firm believer in this type of positivity which ties in with visualisation.
Henry Ford once said:
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right”
2. Try Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP): Despite the complicated
looking title, NLP can be broken into some easy to complete steps. I
have tried this technique myself to reduce anxiety about something and
it brought me back to a place where I felt full of confidence, belief and
reduced my anxiety levels. To try this, close your eyes and take yourself
back to a specific situation in your life where you were extremely happy,
almost on top of the world. Every person will have their own unique
situation. It could be something major you achieved in life, something
big that you won or something amazing someone said to you to make
you feel great.
Think about the moment in detail, how good you felt during it, the surroundings
that day, the background, the smells, the feelings, and the
emotions that went with it. While doing this, take in big breaths, and
release them slowly. While keeping your eyes closed, press your thumb
against your index finger (the finger next to the thumb) retaining the
feelings and thoughts from your happy place. Practice doing this a few
times before exam day arrives. The next time you feel yourself becoming
anxious or if you are worried on the day of an exam, try it. It should
bring back those warm feelings of confidence and calmness to help you
deal out that winning hand that you know you have.
3. There’s an app for that: As you know all too well, there are apps for
everything now. Do a search for the words “calm”, “anxiety” or “stress”
on your app store and download two or three apps to see if they would
be helpful in calming you before an exam. You may even stumble across
other useful educational apps for your subjects, as there are loads of free
one’s available out there for foreign languages and subjects like Maths
and History.
4. Chat with your friends: A parent contacted me recently concerned
about their child locking themselves away from the world with the sole
focus of studying. Is this you? It is important that you keep in touch with
friends around exam time and talking through issues and problems based
around the exams is one of the best forms of therapy. If I am trying to sort
out a problem in my head, catching up with friends socially and explaining
what’s going on usually helps me simplify it. Almost immediately, I feel the
issues around the problem become clearer upon speaking to someone about
it. You know yourself that a fake reality can be created and grow in one’s
mind, so try and keep as much of it out in the open as you can, in order to
keep your anxiety levels balanced. Conversations in person are much more
beneficial than living in a sometimes false online world.
5. Train yourself to think ahead: Under stress, the brain releases a
chemical called cortisol which raises the heart rate and clouds rational and
logical thinking. We are all familiar with the “post-mortem”, looking back
and assessing a situation to see how we can do things better in the future.
An emerging idea is that of a “pre mortem”. The way this works is to write
down all the things that can go wrong and then you try to figure out what
you can do to try to prevent them happening or minimising the damage
from them. For exams, you need to think ahead to the potential pitfalls that
could occur on the day in order to be better mentally prepared. The reality of
any exam paper is there will be issues and surprises on it, in that it’s almost
impossible to predict it exactly. Good Luck. Joe.