Recently, the density of students struggling with exam anxiety has been gradually increasing. As exam times approach, symptoms of exam anxiety can also be observed in students. Among these symptoms are anxiety, difficulty in comprehension, attention deficit, and various avoidance behaviors. If families observe these symptoms in their children, they may need to seek expert help.
What is Test Anxiety?
Most people experience anxiety and fear before exams. In fact, experiencing a normal level of anxiety protects the person and is a healthy emotion. It keeps individuals psychologically and physiologically alert and helps them perform better. However, experiencing excessive levels of anxiety and fear negatively affects a person's daily life, causing their performance to decrease and deteriorate. It is important to get support for children who experience intense test anxiety and fear.
What Are the Symptoms of Test Anxiety?
Test anxiety causes physical, cognitive, behavioral, and emotional symptoms at various levels in the individual. You need to make your child, who is experiencing test anxiety, feel that you are by his side as a family. This way, he will feel less pressure on himself. There are some physical symptoms of test anxiety. We can list them as follows;
- Palpitations in the individual
- Sweating
- Trembling
- Accelerated heartbeats, feeling of palpitations
- Differences in breathing
- Outbursts of anger, tension
- Sweating and/or chills independent of the weather
- Dry mouth
- Nausea
- Diarrhea, constipation
- Headache
- Difficulty falling asleep
- Difficulty focusing
- Feeling excessively tired and exhausted
- Changes in eating patterns
- Complaints such as dry mouth and nausea may be observed.
Cognitively and behaviorally, the individual may exhibit avoidance behavior toward the situation that creates anxiety and fear. Such individuals generally criticize themselves and damage their internal motivation toward the goal.
Negative self-criticism affects his body, affect, and the thoughts passing through his mind, leading to cognitive errors. For example, a person experiencing test anxiety thinks about losing control during the exam or implants the idea that the exam is difficult into his consciousness, and negative thoughts make him more anxious and he loses control.
In addition, individuals experiencing test anxiety may also exhibit emotional symptoms such as feelings of resentment, anger, and helplessness toward himself when he cannot perform as desired.
How to Cope with Test Anxiety?
- To manage anxiety, the individual needs to find a motivation that suits him.
- Instead of turning anxiety into a fear of the future, it is necessary to channel the current anxiety in a positive direction.
- The individual needs to allocate time for himself in his spare time and focus on the things he loves.
- The individual needs to acquire a hobby through which he can channel his anxiety.
Test anxiety, is a psychological condition that occurs during exam times and causes excessive distress and worry. Most people experience a certain degree of anxiety and stress before or during an exam, but when this situation becomes unmanageable, it negatively affects learning and performance. Excessive anxiety and fear make concentration difficult, and the person exerts a lot of effort to remember the subject he studied. To measure test anxiety stress, you can review the MOXO test located at the link specified at https://cdn.npistanbul.com/sinav-kaygisi-testi .
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