First, I hope everyone knows that anxiety is not inherently bad for you. It’s actually very important, at least evolutionarily speaking. It is the way we humans take precautions, which also means that the existence of anxiety is proof that we care about the things. Unfortunately, our minds being programmed to utilize anxiety the way we use it means that even if we aren’t faced with great danger, we still look for such danger and worry about it.
I know there must be plenty of students in worse situations than I am in or ever was, but I would like to mention my journey of “fixing my test anxiety” to help others gain just a little more insight. Following the pandemic online-learning year of my freshman year in high school, not having taken school seriously yet, I signed myself up for a very stressful sophomore year in-person. It was my first year actually in high school; as a sophomore; taking 4 AP classes; all after barely paying attention and getting myself to be productive for almost a year and a half straight. Every test at the beginning of that year was some of the most torturous sessions of 50 minutes I’ve felt in a school setting. My incessant thoughts arose every time: “What if I make silly mistakes and my grade really plummets?”, “Then I would have to drop this course”, and stuff like that. These came up every few moments of each test. I panicked during most of my exams and as a result performed poorly, and performing poorly on a test only furthered my anxiety for every test afterwards.
Between each of my “poor performances”, I would become very serious and try to “fix” my situation. I would push myself to spend more time and energy right before each exam preparing and cramming every last piece of information that had the slightest chance of appearing on the exam so that I would do well. This simply didn’t work. The more I pushed myself, the more stressful each test was and susceptible to failure I was.
Hm, so I think we have a good understanding of maybe why this was happening. My brain became conditioned to looking for the danger in performing badly and became anxious of such “failure” regardless of the actual absolute effect a single failure on an exam would have on my life. How does one fix this? The solution that worked for me was to step backwards. As contradictory as it sounds, the reason I got out of the continuous loop of test anxiety was because I focused less on tests throughout my everyday life. This includes me meditating, finding joy in other activities, and exercising/eating a lot. I think these types of activities help people reach a natural equilibrium where they stop being “too immersed” in a goal they are trying to achieve, such as not having test anxiety
By stepping back and taking care of the other aspects of my life, I was able to frame the “test anxiety” problem better. I realized that relative to the many struggles on this planet, “test anxiety” ranked pretty low; tons of people can barely make it through a day with enough food to survive all while living in the fear of a tragic death of someone close to them, but I was here worrying about a history test in my high school. That is not to say that one's worries are invalid just because they aren’t the worst of all the worries in the world of course. But I think it is important to not only understand the relative importance of your issue at hand but be consciously aware of its importance as much as you can. This really helped me stop fearing failing and, in turn, resulted in my performance going up!
