How To Deal with Exam Anxiety: When You're Too Scared to Study

Exam anxiety is one of the common anxieties among students. Stress during exams is normal and could be helpful by making you prepared. However, anxiety could be more than normal range and could be debilitating.

You become so nervous and anxious that you lose concentration and may not even focus. Too much anxiety sometimes could make you forgetful as well and you may not remember things that you knew otherwise. Anxiety during exams makes you so nervous that you may not even focus on writing during the actual exams.

The common symptoms of exam anxiety

Forgetfulness, concentrating too much on results, concentrating on how to answer your exams question, fear of appearing in exams, keeping your hands and feet warm, avoiding socialization, slandering other students, getting sick, run out of ways to go to the exam, having another question and so on and so forth. Have you come to the point where you are extremely nervous and you feel afraid and fear to go to the exam? These are all signs that your anxiety level is above normal range.

How exam anxiety could be really affecting your studying

Exam anxiety could be affecting you when you are already writing your actual exam. During the actual exam, if you are too anxious you may want to leave the exam hall. Or, it may make you think that you will not do well if you leave the exam hall. You could even think that it will affect your performance in the next exam. If exam anxiety is affecting your preparation and actual performance then we need to realize that it is more serious than the normal range or normal stress that you experience other time. If exam anxiety is more serious, you may be spending more time in the bathroom or hyperventilating. You may even avoid eating too. You may worry that if you eat, you will not do well.

What can you do to deal with exam anxiety?

Here are the few tips to ease exam anxiety:

1. Accept that you have exam anxiety and embrace it fully. By accepting the problem, you can take initiations to take remedies to address the problem. Sometimes, problems empower us. By accepting problem, you can look the problem up-close and see what really works.
   
2. It is recommended to always break a bad habit before a new one. To break exam anxiety, change your current study-habit and do a new one instead. Try doing something new instead of studying the same way that you have been doing. This will prevent you from doing the same distractions that makes you to forget things.
   
3. Just breathe, breathe, and release tension. This will calm you down. Breathe slowly and focus on your breathing. Deep breathe into your stomach (for beginners, you can hold your breath for three seconds, then you can release your breath slowly).
   
4. Stay relaxed. Relaxation will help you to focus and not to feel anxious. Relaxing helps you to reduce stress.
   
5. Meditate or visualize yourself doing well in your exams.