Students’ Speak: Learn to relax while visualising yourself taking the exam

By: Srinivas Goud

Exam anxiety is the experience of feeling an intense moment of fear or panic before and during an exam or assessment.

There are two types of anxiety:

Low anxiety: Students who experience low anxiety may feel nervous about an upcoming exam but are still ready to focus their attention on their studies or the questions asked during the assessment. Usually, low anxiety students aren't struck with intrusive thoughts or feel debilitated by the exam.

High anxiety: Students who experience high anxiety show an instantaneous generalised anxiety disorder when exposed to the scary test situation. They try to avoid exposure to the exam, or may endure it but with extreme fear. High anxiety can lead to a situation where you say “I just really can’t do this”. The challenge is to recognise when your anxiety has increased past an optimal level that it starts to impact your ability to finish the exam - this is often a high level of hysteria. So, how would you be able to cool your nerves during the exam? If you identify high anxiety in yourself, you'll learn ways to manage it in order that it doesn’t take over your exam performance.

The skills you discover helpful in managing your exam anxiety will vary counting on what could be contributing to your high levels of hysteria. If students experience high levels of hysteria before an exam, they should engage in self-care strategies by keeping an eye on the sleeping pattern, nutrition, exercise, and implementing a couple of relaxation routines. Students sometimes forget these small steps as they will feel consumed by the fear of the exam.

Relaxation training

Psychologists and well-being teams have a variety of techniques to assist manage test anxiety and may also recommend ways to enhance your study skills. The goal of the techniques is to assist students to understand the character of their anxiety so that they could cope more effectively with upcoming evaluations. This may include behavioral intervention that aims to show relaxation training like mindfulness.

Mindfulness is where students try to specialise at this moment, while calmly acknowledging and accepting their anxious feelings, thoughts, and physical reactions. Relaxation training is often used alongside a process of desensitisation technique – this is often where an individual visualises a scene while being completely relaxed, and therefore the image evokes a number of emotions of the important scene. The idea is that if you learn to relax while visualising yourself taking the exam, you'll also learn to be relaxed while actually taking the exam.

About the Author:

Srinivas Goud is a student at CMR Technical Campus pursuing BTech in Electronics and Communication Engineering.