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Even if you know your subject and you prepared well, anxiety or panic during an exam can block information from your conscious mind, resulting in an unfair score instead of an accurate measure of your ability.
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Exams judge you, regardless of your performance before or after the test. Subconsciously, your mind sees an exam in primordial terms: What you are doing is familiar, but this time the consequences are more serious than usual.
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In your wild subconscious mind, you know how to balance, walking along a fallen tree trunk on the ground. Some time later in life, you may have your skill tested by crossing a river using a fallen tree as a bridge. During an exam, your subconscious mind triggers adrenaline, to increase awareness, balance, and body strength, but this is of little benefit to you, sitting in an exam hall. In fact, it increases the problem: the enforced lack of movement causes anxiety - hence fidgeting or leg bouncing. Adrenaline and anxiety block the memory from functioning. And then:
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I panicked!
I knew the work but my mind went blank!
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If this has ever happened to you, your subconscious mind remembers the experience, and anticipates the same anxiety in your next exam. Anticipatory anxiety actually creates anxiety out of nothing but fear.
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This is a subconscious survival strategy designed to for-warn you about what is to come, but it doesn't help with your studying!
- It makes studying very difficult, the mind wonders, you become easily distracted
- You put off studying until the last minute
- You then have even more anxiety in the exam because you have not been able to study
- The cycle repeats, gaining momentum every time
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The only way to break the cycle is:
- learning and applying the skill of directing your mind
- re-establish good recall and efficient access to your memory
- overcoming your anxiety and anticipatory anxiety by learning a new habit
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