UNDERSTANDING AND OVERCOMING EXAM ANXIETY

What Is Exam Anxiety?

It is defined as intense anxiety that prevents the information learned before being used effectively during the exam and leads to a drop in success. Students experiencing exam anxiety may experience sweating, tremors, rapid heartbeat, dry mouth or nausea. Physical symptoms may include headache, shortness of breath, and a chance in appetite due to stress.

Why Exam Anxiety Occurs?

Failure to meet physiological, such as inadequate nutrition, sleep disorders, smoking, alcohol consumption and negative thoughts about the exam, cause exam anxiety and subsequent failure.

How To Overcome Exam Anxiety?

The most important step in dealing with exam anxiety is to question and re-evaluate these thoughts and beliefs. In addition to these, breathing exercises, thought stopping or focusing attention techniques are also effective methods for dealing with exam anxiety.

Peer Support: What You Should Do For Your Children?

Parents should be consistent in their relationship with their children during the exam period. Since overly harsh behavior or overly sensitive behavior will increase the child's anxiety, such actions, behavior and verbal communication should be avoided.The child’s achievements and experiences should not be compared with his peers. Care should be taken when forming sentences, especially sentences containing comparisons should not be made.The child should be told that exams are not a measure of personality and character evaluation, that winning and losing are part of life and that failure in the exam is not the end of life. 

Do Not Try To Eliminate Anxiety

The goal is not to eliminate anxiety completely. Do not succumb to anxiety and keep the anxiety at a certain level. A certain level of anxiety helps to feel desire, decision-making and production of energy in line with the decisions taken and to increase performance by using this energy. Therefore, while helping students cope with anxiety, it is necessary to help them reduce anxiety to a certain level rather than removing it completely. 

To Overcome Anxiety, Take Psychological Support

If your anxiety experience harms you both physically and psychologically and if your anxiety exercises don’t help it’s good for you to take help from a professional person's psychological help.