Assessment Anxiety
When you study, you are requiring your body to sit in a sedentary position for a significant amount of time while you attempt to remain alert and focussed on the material you are reading or writing. Anxiety initially helps you to stay alert and focussed. However, the more you push yourself to continue to sit and study, foregoing sleep, proper food, social contact and relaxation for your mind and body, the more difficult it becomes for you to have control over the situation. Over time your energy is depleted, your thinking becomes fuzzy, you become irritable and you start making mistakes. These mistakes then trigger more anxiety and you cannot relax because you are worried about what other situations might occur. This in turn increases the likelihood that such situations will occur.
Understanding how we react to exam anxiety is the first step in avoiding these negative outcomes to feeling stressed. We need to keep in mind that there are two main ways of coping:
- coping strategies which we use to manage the problem causing the stress, for instance deciding to study a lot as a way of facing the challenge of the exams, and
- coping strategies which we use to regulate our emotional response to the problem, for instance, getting support from friends.
Review the following tip sheet for more information: