Exams are a completely unnatural situation if you think about it.

When else are you required to sit still for hours on end, pushing your mind and body to focus, to retrieve and regurgitate loads of information just so you can show someone you don’t know that you can do something you don’t care about?

In an exam situation, you cannot peacefully take a break when your body needs it. Busting to go to the loo? Tough luck, you lose valuable exam time if you decide to go. Hungry or thirsty? Well, you clearly didn’t stuff your face with enough food all those hours ago before the exam started. Now you have to wait until it’s over to give your body the nutrition it needs.

Seriously, the way exams are structured and the things expected of you during those hours are not naturally wired within us. Exam skills need to be trained and developed.

What makes matters worse for most students is that most exam situations are purely based on your performance on the day. What if you are sick on the day? What about if you have other important things going on in your life which take attention away from the exam? Totally unfair if you think about it.

To combat exam stress for good it helps if you understand the function and purpose of an exam. Albeit what you’ve been told by teachers and everyone else at school, exams do not test real knowledge.

That’s right. I’ll say it again because it is just that important: exams do not test real knowledge.

This means that even if you knew everything there was to know about a subject, you aren’t guaranteed to go well in an exam. What most exams are really testing is if you can answer often hypothetical questions in the ways your teachers have told you to answer them. Many exams have become about filling in the right answer in the right box rather than encouraging creative thinking and learning.

If your response does not include the specific keywords the markers are looking for you may lose marks even if you understand the topic and have studied it before the exam.

This is the true nature of exams. They are standardised and they are performance based.

It is like having a monkey, a rabbit, a fish, an elephant, a dog and an ant all taking the same exam. The exam might be a test of who can climb a tree the fastest. It is a standardised test because it is the same for all of the individual participants (despite their VERY different capabilities, skills and perhaps interests).

A fish might go its whole life thinking it is a complete and utter failure at everything because it can never climb that tree, no matter how much it tries. Climbing a tree is such a ridiculous expectation to have of a fish though. It will never need to be able to do that in reality. Grading a fish based on its performance in a tree climbing test is therefore absolutely ludicrous!

This analogy is the same for all standardised and performance based exams in schools too. You are different to your classmates. You have different skills, capabilities and interests. The skills you will need to develop will be totally different to what others may need to develop on the basis of your difference in personality and interests.

School is an educational buffet and you get to choose what you wish to take from it. However, you don’t get to choose what you get tested on. Know this, expect this and plan for it. For loads of useful tips on how you can get the best results in your exams, check out the Study Hacker book.

Understanding the nature of exams is a very important foundational step. It is necessary if you want to be able to eliminate your exam stress but in and of itself, it won’t do you much good because it doesn’t include your internal emotional environment.

Stress is fundamentally an internal experience. Understanding the external circumstances surrounding exams paves the way for you to then look internally at what is really causing your stress.

The types of thoughts you think and the feelings you experience are what contribute to your overall experience of stress. There are three components of the overall stress experience:

1. The physical component: physical symptoms of stress in the body such as elevated heart rate, perspiration, short breaths and release of adrenalin
2. The emotional component: the panicky feeling of anxiety bubbling up within you. Different levels of intensity can trigger different experiences for students
3. The mental component: worry producing thoughts are the fuel which add fire to stress’s flame

Beneath these components though, there is an underlying element of fear. If you experience exam stress, the exam situation is likely to trigger an underlying fear that you have. Perhaps it is a fear of failure or a fear of the unknown. This fear fuels your worry thoughts which then triggers the overall stress response within you.

The more you worry, the worse your stress gets. Worry is also the only component of the three which you can directly change. The physical and emotional components will also change as a result of the elimination of worry.

To end all your worry thoughts around exams, imagine yourself facing your underlying fear head on. What is this fear protecting you from? In other words, what is the worst possible thing that could happen which is triggering the fear that you are experiencing?

Imagine that this has happened to you. You are now living in a situation where the worst thing that could happen did happen. What can you do now to make it not so bad? Maybe you need to do some research to find out about opportunities that would be available to you if this situation were to happen.

In the example of an exam, the worst thing might be that you get 0%. Once you figure out ways of still being able to do the things you want to do even if you get 0% then you have nothing to fear. Your success in life no longer relies on your success in your exam. So you can literally get 0%, 100% or anything in between and still be winning!

This is such a powerful position to put yourself into. For more information on this process, I recommend you check out the Stress Management chapter in the Study Hacker book. You will find information on how to tackle any fear or limiting belief and overcome worry, stress and anxiety once and for good. This process alone has helped a number of students we’ve worked with instantly improve their grades, and we are sure it can do the same for you. So, get on it!

This is the final recommendation we make to students when it comes to overcoming exam stress. While exam stress and study skills may at first seem somewhat unrelated, research has indicated that they are actually very heavily intertwined.

Over years of research, two main approaches have been found to help students successfully overcome stress and improve their grades. The first approach is for students who generally have good study skills but who find that their stress before and during an exam interferes with their ability to access the knowledge they have stored in their mind from their previous study.

For these students, a solution which targets the elimination of worry producing thoughts is the best thing to do. That’s why it is important for you to follow the processes mentioned above and in the Stress Management chapter of the StudyHacker book to make sure you are not dealing wth worry at the last minute, during an exam or when it is too late for you to do anything about it.

The second approach is for students who do not have a solid knowledge base either due to the lack of appropriate preparation or the difficulty in understanding the concepts being tested. For these students, research suggests the best approach to take is to build up their study and exam taking skills.

Preparing for an exam by actually practicing the exam situation beforehand goes a long way toward building up confidence and removing some of the fear around exams. That’s where the 4 Phase Study plan totally kicks butt. It incorporates everything you need in order to make sure that you study effectively each and every time and for exams of any nature.

Figuring out your learning styles also goes a long way toward making study and easier process for you. Reading information from a textbook just may not be the best way that your brain learns. Perhaps videos are a better way for you to absorb information. If you know what learning styles suit you best then you can instantly upgrade your study skills.

All the resources and information we provide are aimed at ensuring you succeed in all your academic battles. It is the combination of developing good study skills and eliminating worry that will really help you win the battle with exam stress.

If you have any other concerns around overcoming exam stress, feel free to contact us or book in a complimentary online coaching call so we can point you in the right direction for your specific situation.