Beating Test Anxiety: How to Build the Confidence to Succeed When It Counts—Speculation on Why We Freeze Under Pressure
Everyone feels stress and pressure in any significant contest. Prepared or not, when the chips are down we all feel our adrenaline rise. You know, maybe your heart beats faster, you might have a sheen of cold sweat, or you might get tunnel vision. Or you get overly excited and can’t sit still.
The value of the thoughts and speculations I am about to share is not about scientific validity, but rather the mental structure they allow you to build to improve your own effectiveness.
I think we respond to threats this way because this is how we are wired as people, and this wiring is the result of our evolutionary process. Back in long-ago times, sudden contests were very high stakes. People might have heard a rustle in the woods, which was really a ferocious animal about to jump out to eat them. In such circumstances, we generally either become energized or freeze without much choice in the matter. Either could have been a great way to survive: if you freeze the animal sees you as nonthreatening and passes, and if you are energized you could fight or run more effectively. In other words, these responses worked in more primitive living conditions. The same sort of responses applied in any battle or life-and-death contests. These strategies were selected for because they worked, and those who displayed them survived to pass along their genes.
How much worse is it when you have the time to consider a future known high-stakes event? Our minds like to scan every possible scenario for what can go wrong and this is a good thing; it allows you to prepare. Part of winning is contingency planning. But even a daydream about a high-stakes event tends to cause the same responses discussed above, and these programmed responses are not always so good in the modern world, especially if they are happening over and over again. We can truly turn something fun into a crisis this way! By repeatedly feeling anxiety tied to an impending event like a test, we run a real risk of creating an automatic response that will rear its head come test day, ensuring feelings of panic.
So if you tend to run through negative scenarios leading up to the test day, or freeze when the timer starts, take solace in knowing a little of why that happens. And knowledge is power. If you have these issues, you are framing this as a decisive point event, which triggers all your evolutionary wiring. But you can choose a different view, one that may not activate the trigger.
The Takeaway
What we put into our minds is important. What if instead of viewing the exam as a major contest, determined at a point in time, we took a larger view?
I’m sure you’ll agree that when viewed as a single point, the odds seem very intimidating. There are a lot of outside forces that can derail your plans in a single day. Psychology calls this type of view an “external locus of control.” In this view, slight variations in things can sink you, like how much you eat or sleep going into the exam, the amount of noise or temperature in the testing center, writer’s block, or blanking out. This type of thinking is extremely disempowering.
You can train yourself to view things through what is called the “internal locus of control.” In other words, outcomes are decided by your own actions instead of outside forces. And the way to develop this mindset is to understand what preparation and studying really is: practice.
The outcome of the exam is not decided by the events on exam day; it is decided by the sum of your efforts to prepare for it, a process of months of intense work that took you from perplexity to understanding of the topics. A little bit of effort spent every day in prep adds up to a huge result. So by this logic, what happens on exam day does not depend on one or two things—it depends on thousands of actions you’ve already taken. The exam has already been passed or failed in your preparation; the actual day’s events have absolutely no bearing on this.
Perhaps some of you read that and groaned, but some of you can hear the ring of truth in those words. If you have taken many practice exams, done the Q-bank questions, and read the material, you are as prepared as you ever will be. And if you haven’t done those things, do you really think that the last-minute prep is going to really matter? Either way, your best outcome is through doing your absolute very best. So there are no stakes in what goes on at the actual exam.
This view liberates you to be creative and flexible, and it prevents tunnel vision. More importantly, you can make this event fun from that state.
If you can internalize this view, you are on your way to a much less-stressful day at the exam, and any other contest you have time to prepare for.
About the Author
Pete Baksh, CFA, currently serves as chief investment officer for the trust department at the First National Bank of Mount Dora. His team manages approximately USD 650 million in discretionary assets across all asset classes for private clients and institutions. He’s been an active member of award-winning CFA® Society of Orlando, where he’s held various executive roles. Pete has a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Florida and an MBA from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University. He is passionate about learning and taught Portfolio Analysis and Management at the University of Central Florida as an adjunct professor in the fall of 2019. You can connect with Pete via LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/petebaksh/.