Learn and Work Smarter

118. The Real Reason for Test Anxiety — And Why It Has Nothing to Do With Nerves

• Katie Azevedo • Episode 118

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Sweaty palms. Racing breath. A pit in your stomach. And the worst one of all, a blank mind.

Test anxiety does not feel good, and it most certainly doesn’t help your grades. But in this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I make the (controversial?) case that test anxiety is the result of something you have complete control over.

What You Learn:

  • The most common misunderstandings about test anxiety
  • What people THINK causes test anxiety
  • Why there’s no such thing as a bad test taker
  • The REAL cause of test anxiety (you might not like hearing this)
  • How to prevent test anxiety on your very next exam
  • How to decrease the physiological symptoms of test anxiety when it’s too late to prevent it

🔗 Resources Mentioned:

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You are at your desk watching the professor walk down the aisles, handing out the exams, and they place one face down on the desk in front of you. But before you even flip it over, before you even read a single question, you feel it. Your palms are sweating. Your heart's speeding faster, you're breathing is all messed up, and maybe you're shaking a little. Your leg starts doing that jiggly thing under the desk. You have a pit in your stomach and you swear something weird is going on with your vision. You flip over the test and you read that first question, and that's when you realize that your mind is completely blank. This is often what we call test anxiety. And if you've ever felt it even just one time, you know exactly the feeling that I am describing. It's one of those ones that's really hard to forget. Today's episode, as you can tell from the title, is all about what I argue is the real reason for test anxiety, and I honestly might ruffle some feathers here when I come right out of the gate saying that it has nothing to do with nerves. Hey, welcome to the show. I'm Katie Azevedo. This is the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, and this is episode 118. Today's episode is geared towards students, so if you are a student, this one is most definitely for you, but if you're not a student but you know one, or maybe you're a parent listening, I'd ask you to forward this episode to them when you're done listening yourself. You can do that by simply tapping the little share arrow icon wherever you're listening or watching. And if you are watching on YouTube, make sure you're subscribed. Come find me on Instagram at School Habits. I love connecting with listeners over there. All right, we have a cool show today. Let's go. All right, so let me give you a brief agenda of what we're gonna cover today. I'm gonna start by going over what most people think test anxiety is, and trust me, it's not what you think. And then I'm gonna share what test anxiety really is. And again, this might surprise you or even ruffle some feathers, but this is really important to understand before we get to the final section, which is where I tell you what to do about it. Because obviously understanding the problem, is only useful if it points you to a solution. Okay, so starting with what most people think test anxiety is. Usually when students say they have test anxiety, what they're really trying to say is, I know the material. I definitely studied it. I even reviewed it in class. I even did well on my homework. But something happens to me whenever I sit down to take a test. My brain goes blank, my body gets weird, and I literally forget everything that I studied before. Students honestly tell me this all of the time, especially when I'm first starting to work with someone in my private practice or inside SchoolHabits university, they're like, I have test anxiety as if that is all there is to it, like end of declaration. And the implication there is that the anxiety itself is the problem, that it's some kind of permanent thing that they have no control over. Now look. I do want to be very, very clear here with a disclaimer. Anxiety disorders or general anxiety disorder is a very real thing. It is a medical condition, and I'm not a physician. And so if you have a clinical anxiety diagnosis or you suspect that that's something that you're dealing with, that episode is certainly not a replacement for professional support. Okay? And you should not use anything I talk about in today's episode as diagnostic in any way by any means, because I'm not offering medical advice. What I am talking about is the test anxiety that most students experience at some point, right? So it's test anxiety. It's not generalized anxiety disorder. This is the kind of anxiety that appears almost exclusively before or during exams, and then sometimes other kind of performance situations, but it's not part of a broader anxiety disorder, okay? For most students, test anxiety is not a disorder, like in the clinical sense. I mean, it can be, but I am not the person for that. All right. Not a medical doctor, but for most students it is a signal that doesn't want to be ignored, but it so often is, and that right there is the problem. I'm gonna get to that. But before I tell you what test anxiety really is, and what I mean by it's a signal of something, I also wanna address something else. I hear a lot because it's related. Okay. I am constantly hearing students say, I am just bad at tests. And I hear this from parents too, who are like, my kid's really smart. They're just bad at tests, like it's written into their DNA or something like that. And I tend to push back really hard on that. I'm bad at tests thing. Okay? Like really hard because I'm bad at tests is not a thing. All right? I, I may have just lost some of you right there, but it's not a thing. That's just a conclusion that someone drew logically after repeatedly having bad experiences with tests and never understanding why those bad experiences were happening. Of course, disclaimer, if you have like expressive language deficits or written language deficits, and the test is inaccessible to you, that's a completely different thing, right? But I do totally get it. If you keep doing something and you get a bad result, it is so logical and rational to be like, well, I'm bad at that thing. But it's important to stop and think, am I even doing this thing right before you claim that you're bad at it? So here's my take on both of those beliefs. The, I just have test anxiety and the, I'm just a bad test taker one, and this is the part that might ruffle some feathers. I feel like I'm doing a, doing a lot of feather ruffling, but please try to stay with me. Test anxiety, the kind that I'm describing here around exams, not the clinical kind is not any kind of malfunction. It is honestly your mind doing exactly what is supposed to do. When you feel the sweaty hands, the pit in your stomach our brain regions in charge of knowledge and memory are truly honestly giving you accurate information. In the moment it's saying, I am not confident that I know this well enough to perform right now. And that's the signal that so many students ignore. But that's all it is. The sweaty palms, the pit in your stomach, and the jiggly leg thing. And the going blank. That's just a signal that your brain is saying, I am not confident that I know this well enough to perform right now. Rock solid confidence does not come from hoping we know something. It doesn't come from just loosely reviewing our notes or flipping through textbooks and thinking, yeah, like I hope I'm good. True confidence that doesn't disappear when you read your first test question comes from one place only evidence. It comes from having proven to yourself over and over again that you are fully capable of pulling information from your working memory without anything in front of you. Now, it's not my intention for this episode to be all doom and gloom, even though I know that's exactly what it feels like when you're experiencing test anxiety. I have experienced it before, so I know it personally. Like my mind has gone completely blank. I had such a sweat response. I'm a sweaty person anyway, but such a physical sweat response on my hands in college that I disintegrated a chemistry test, I literally could not. Like I turned the paper into pulp on the desk, like I, I couldn't take it. Thankfully, I had a compassionate instructor. So I do know that it really, really stinks, and I do know what it feels like. However, I want you guys to lean in a little closer here. If you're zoning out or you have me on in the background while you're doing something else, lock back in for a second because everything I just said up to this point in the episode is actually really, really good news. It is, I promise. because if test anxiety were unfixable or just some genetically hardwired thing about you, then you have no control over, if it was really nothing we could do about it, or if you really are just a bad test taker and you're gonna be that way for the rest of your entire life, then that would stink a lot. And that is a really hopeless place to be like, okay, great. I have this thing. There's nothing I can do about it for the rest of my life. But that's not true because as I told you, test anxiety is just a signal. It is a signal telling us that we have not yet proven mastery to ourselves. That means it's not permanent. It is simply feedback that we can do something with. I mean, all feedback is something that we can do something with because think about what this really means for a second. Every single student who has ever walked into a test with a racing heart and sweaty hands and weird breathing, and a completely blank mind, that experience was not random. It didn't just happen outta nowhere for no reason. It was the result of everything leading up to that moment. And it's all the things leading up to that moment that we can control. That's the good news. Now, the other point I wanna make is this, students who stop experiencing test anxiety, and yes, they do exist. I've worked with so, so many of them. They're not the ones who just woke up one day and somehow didn't experience test anxiety anymore. They didn't just tell themselves to get over it. They didn't just tell themselves to relax because Lord knows that doesn't work. They're the ones who listened to that signal, who didn't deny that it was there in the first place. And they said, what is this signal telling me? And then they changed how they prepared for their exams. How did they do that? Well, they started showing up to their tests having collected a whole bunch of evidence that they knew what they were doing, that they knew the material, and they weren't relying on hopes and feelings, but they had collected real hard, undeniable proof. and when you have that kind of proof, we don't have anything to panic about. Like literally, there's nothing to panic about when you have a hundred percent certainty. You look at the test questions and you're like, yeah, like I got it. Like I've done 50,000 of these this week. Yes, I've done this a million times before today. And anything that we've done a million times before, like we don't have to panic about. So that mindset change right there from like, oh, I'm just gonna freak out on this test like I always do, to wait a minute. What am I gonna do differently to give myself the evidence that I know what I'm doing? That's the key. And that my friends is completely within your control. All right, so I just told you there is hope and that you can totally control the situation. So let's move into what those strategies are. Let wanna be really clear. I am not just gonna tell you to study more. I know a lot of you are studying enough already, so this isn't just about spending more hours with your notes or flipping through your teacher slides for the 11th time, but this is about studying differently from however you have up until this point. And there's a few different things that genuinely move the needle here. The first one is spaced repetition. This is honestly a fancy way of saying spread your study sessions out over time. Short, frequent study sessions spaced out over time, like at least a week if you can, beats an epic single study session hands down. Cramming does not work. And I know you've heard that before, but I, I want you to understand psychologically or I guess cognitively why criming is bad, just so you're not like, yeah, criming is bad and nothing can do it anyway. So when you study the same material across multiple sessions for multiple days, you're forcing yourself to retrieve or recall the information every single time you come back to it. And every single time you do this, you're strengthening your memory of that information. One giant study session the night before a test doesn't do that. I mean, even if you're studying using really good active recall methods, if you're still only doing it in one session, you're only recalling that information one time. That's not enough repetitions to build the knowledge or the neural pathways or the confidence, which is what will lead directly to test anxiety. For example, you are way better off having six 30 minute study sessions spread out over the course of a week tahn one three hour study session the night before the test. There is no question about it. Now the second thing, I already mentioned this, but it's active recall. This is the actual mechanism of real studying. Any study method that doesn't use active recall is honestly a waste of your time. Active recall means that you are testing yourself on the material without anything in front of you. There's no textbook, there's no answer key. There's no flipping over the flash card flashcards when you almost got it. There's no notes. It is literally just you and the test question or the practice question or the trigger cue. I have a podcast episode on Active Recall that I will link in the show notes that is episode 20. In that episode, I share some specific strategies for active Recall, and then I also want to point you to episode 104 where I get into three specific reasons why your study methods may have stopped working or maybe never worked in the first place. That one pairs really well with what we're talking about today. I'll link both episodes in the show notes. But the most important active recall method that I wanna highlight here is practice questions. Doing practice questions like really hard questions, the kind where you are a little uncomfortable, because you have to think, that's the closest thing to a test that you can do before a test. And that's the entire point. You wanna put yourself in that situation, the testing situation over and over again before you even get there. You wanna create simulations where you're struggling to retrieve that information before the real thing when the stakes are a lot higher. That way when you sit down for the real test, your brain's like, yeah, again, I have done this 50,000 times. I am good here. You can get practice questions from so many places. You could do your previous quizzes, the chapter questions in the textbook. Um, ask your professor if they have any extra ones laying around. And yes, you can use AI to generate practice questions too. I have made my case very strongly on this show before, and I will continue to do so. I am against using AI for thinking and writing tasks. That is literally the dumbest thing that anybody could do if you care about preserving your ability to reason, which is what? separates us from being plants, but when it comes to creating practice questions from good quality material that you feed into something like Chat or Gemini or Claude or whatever you use, that can actually be really helpful here. So ask whatever tool you're using to give you practice problems on the topic you're studying, but you wanna make sure that you give it plenty of practice questions that you already have access to. That's key because you want it to know the context and the level that your test is gonna be on. All right. That is a legitimate use for AI for studying. What's not a legitimate use of ai, and I have to say this because I know it's happening everywhere, is using AI just to do the homework for you. Now, I really wanna talk about using AI for homework because this connects directly to test anxiety in a way that I don't think a lot of students are getting. Like they're not connecting the dots. So many students are submitting AI generated homework answers. So they're like using AI to get the answers for their homework so they can get the credit, so they can get the check mark, and then the night before the test, they're panicking because they realize that they don't know anything and then they're calling it test anxiety, or they show up to the test and realize that they don't know anything they're calling it test anxiety. But what's really happening? is honestly just a direct consequence of outsourcing their learning to ai. Like what did you think would happen if you just use AI to get the answers? You are not learning anything. So of course you're gonna stress out before the test. So in that case, it is a real anxiety that you're feeling, but it's self-inflicted Now, the thing about homework is that the whole point, hear me loud and clear, the whole point is not the grade. If you think it is, you don't get it. You get a grade. Sure. But that's like the byproduct. It's secondary. The entire point of homework is to learn the material. Do you hear me? The entire point of homework is to learn the material so you get weird with it and struggle with it and figure out what you know and what you don't know. Doing homework for the sake of learning the darn thing is one of the best study strategies you could ever have. Your homework is essentially a low stakes practice run on the information before the high stakes test, and when you just completely bypass all of those opportunities to learn the thing by using AI to get the answer for you, you're robbing yourself of exactly the kind of evidence collection that your brain needs to feel confident when you sit down till they take that test. That's how you beat test anxiety. Know your material for real and using AI just to get the answers and earn a check mark is setting you up not only for bad grades, but also the false narrative that you have test anxiety. And the last thing I wanna say in this part here about things you're doing

to worsen your test anxiety is this:

stop waiting to be told there's a test. I know that sounds blunt, but I'm dead serious. We're always in the middle of a unit. There's always gonna be a test on that unit. Why are we surprised? That's just how school works. So why are we waiting for the test to appear in Google Classroom or Canvas before we start thinking about it? Why are we waiting for the professor to announce outta nowhere that there's gonna be a test? When of course there's gonna be a test. You've been learning about the thing for a few days. There's gonna be an assessment. You learn assessment. Learn assessment. That is like it or not, how school works. You gotta learn the material as you go. Take the homework practice work seriously, review your notes after class. Yes, that's a thing people do that they just don't talk about it. And as cheesy as it sounds, check in with yourself to make sure that you're understanding what's being taught in class. Don't wait for the night before to check in with yourself to see what you know, like if you learn the material along the way, you'll never, ever have to have these big, epic, stressful study sessions. Again, learn as you go. That's the secret. It is so much less stressful and you'll have way less test anxiety. The kids who get good grades without ever seeming to stress about studying, yeah, they're learning the material as they go. Now, everything I just talked about, the spaced repetition, the active recall, the practice questions, taking your homework seriously, all of that is the long game. That's all under the umbrella of better preparation, and that's what's genuinely gonna eliminate test anxiety at the root over time, and honestly, for your very next test. But I do also wanna adjust the reality that even when you have prepared well, like genuinely correctly, using the right study methods, all the active recall methods in the world, you can still experience anxious sensations and thoughts when you're taking tests. That is okay, that is completely normal. A little bit of, you know, chemical activation and a little bit of adrenaline before a test is not a bad thing at all. It's actually our body's way of hyping ourselves up to perform. It only becomes a problem when that activation expands into a full panic if we let it. So let me give you a few things that you can do in the moment when you're sitting there and you feel those feelings start to creep in. The first one is breathing, and I know, I know. Everyone says breathe. I used to roll my eyes at this too. I'm like, I am breathing. Okay, but there's a reason, and it's not just because breathing sounds nice or because I'm a yogi, so of course I'm gonna tell you to breathe. No. When you're anxious, your breathing gets shallow and fast. This is biological because back in the day when we had to run from the tiger on the safari, rapid and shallow breathing literally kept us alive and made us run faster. And the more shallow and fast we breathe, the more we signal to our nervous system that something is wrong, which activates us, which makes the anxiety worse, but it helps us avoid the tiger. Nice little cycle we have there. So we have to interrupt that cycle deliberately or it's gonna get the best of us. One method I like is box breathing. So you breathe in for four counts, you hold it for four, you breathe out for four, and then you stay empty for four. That's like a box right in hold. Exhale. Hold empty, and you do that a few times before you even look at the first question. I don't know. It takes maybe 30 seconds and it works. The second strategy is grounding. If you're starting to freak out and you can't seem to slow yourself down, grounding techniques can bring you back into the present moment like. I've used these before and I can get pretty anxious, like I'm a tough one to bring back, but I have learned to bring myself back. The simplest way to do this is just to notice five things that you can see right now. Maybe your pen, the desk, the color of the shirt of the person sitting in front of you, maybe the window, maybe the gross ceiling tiles with the leak stain on it, right? It sounds almost too simple to work, but what it does is it redirects our attention away from the catastrophic, untrue thought of, I don't know, anything to the very real physical present moment. And from that present moment, we can think clearly and retrieve the information that we worked so hard to store. And the third one, I like this one. Honestly, I'd say it's, well definitely start with the breathing, but this one's very, very practical. It's a little bit of a brain dump and not brain dump in the way that I typically teach brain dumps inside my programs. But the second you get that test in front of you, before you read a single question, I want you to flip it over to the blank, you know, backside. Or you can do this in the margins and dump everything that you're afraid of forgetting. So maybe formulas, if it's a math test, pneumonic devices that you've remembered, like I know Pemdas, everybody knows that one or whatever. Like if you've come up with a study technique or a pneumonic device to help you remember things, write that down. Vocab dates, conjugation charts. If this is for a language class, like if you have to have a test on the, you know, Spanish preterite, which is the past tense, okay, well then quickly dump a conjugation chart on the back of the test so that you can reference the conjugation chart when you're taking the test. Right? Whatever you crammed into your brain in the last few days, that feels like it's sitting right there, just on the cusp of being forgotten, get it outta your head and onto the paper immediately. Now if you don't do this, you're sitting there trying to answer the test questions, okay? While simultaneously trying to hold 17 other things in your working memory so you don't forget them, that's too much because then you're gonna be like, oh, I'm gonna forget them. And then that increases the test anxiety. And when we have anxiety, we can't access the things in our memory. Like it's becomes inaccessible. That mind going blank thing that's real, even if your anxiety is self-inflicted. So we wanna offload the stuff that we're afraid of forgetting first, and then we free ourselves up to focus on the questions in front of us. Alright, let's bring this home, shall we? What I want you to walk away with today is a full understanding that test anxiety is not a permanent condition that's just randomly for no reason happening to you. When you feel it, wherever you feel it, your chest, your stomach, minds in my chest, wherever it's a signal from your sweet little brain that is quite accurately telling you that you haven't yet collected enough evidence that you know the material well enough to be tested on it, and that signal as uncomfortable as it makes us, is one of the most useful pieces of information that you can collect because it points directly at something you can control. Reducing test anxiety comes down to changing how you're preparing for and studying for your tests. Students who successfully reduce their test anxiety build rock solid confidence by proving to themselves over and over and over again on the days leading up to the tests that they do know it, that they can retrieve information without anything in front of 'em, that they can work through a particular kind of math question when they don't have the answer key. That kind of confidence is unshakeable. It doesn't disappear when you sit down for a test or a quiz because it's not built on hope and prayers. It's built on evidence that you collected for yourself over and over again on multiple days leading up to your exam. Now, if you're sitting here thinking like, okay, Katie, I, I buy this, I hear you, but I genuinely don't know how to do that, how to actually get to the point where I'm a hundred percent confident answering questions without notes in front of me, that is exactly what SchoolHabits University was built for. SchoolHabits University is my flagship program where I teach students a complete academic skill system. The study methods, the systems, the habits, everything that you need to make school easier and get better grades without working any harder. And if you want live real-time help implementing it all, like you actually wanna be able to ask me questions, get feedback from me, and have me in your corner as you build these skills out for yourself that's what the signature tier of School Habits University is for. Signature members get access to live coaching calls with me for an entire year, a full year. So you're not just getting a program and then left on your own to figure it out. You're getting ongoing support while you learn how to put it in practice. You can find all the details at schoolhabitsuniversity.com, but it'll also link everything in the show notes so you don't have to go searching for it. Alright, that's it for today, my friends. Thank you so much for your time. Keep showing up, keep doing the hard work, keep asking the hard questions, and never stop learning.

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Katie Azevedo

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