How to Approach Any Exam With Confidence
You know the feeling: sweaty palms, tightness in your chest and the tunnel vision that centers on the exam paper sitting in front of you. You feel like you should know the answers, but you keep forgetting. You glance at the clock and realize you’re falling behind. When the exam finishes you feel awful — you know that you knew more than what you wrote down on the page.
Why do we get test anxiety and how can we approach any exam with confidence?
In the previous two essays in this series (here and here), I’ve already pointed to a key cause: we don’t know how to study effectively.
Cognitive illusions about memory and understanding are pervasive. Often the reason we underperform on exams is because we actually aren’t learning as much as we think we are. Fixing flawed studying strategies is an essential first step.
Yet if you think anxiety makes it harder to perform well, you’re not alone. Research shows that anxiety can lower our working memory capacity by introducing distracting thoughts. This mental bandwidth is essential for cognitive performance, and is one reason why research shows a low level of general arousal is better for complex tasks.
