Using CBT to Conquer Your Fears: Test Anxiety

Hi everyone! With the first day of school right around the corner, it's easy to feel overwhelmed. The pressure to do well on that first test can bring a flood of anxious thoughts. It’s a challenge that many of us face, but there are tools you can learn to manage that anxiety and perform your best.

Here's how you can use CBT methods to reframe your test-taking experience:

1. Identify anxious thoughts

2. Challenge them with evidence

3. Practice coping techniques

The first step is to be a detective for your own mind. When you start feeling stressed about the test, what specific thoughts are you thinking of? Jot them down, and be honest with yourself. They might look like this:

• “I’m going to fail this test.”

• “Everyone else knows this subject better than me.”

• “I’m not smart enough to do well.”

Remember that thoughts are not facts. These negative concepts can pop up without you even directly thinking about them, and are often exaggerated or not true.

Now that you have recognized those thoughts, challenge them. In other words, think about whether they are assumptions and change your perspective. Is this negative thought 100% correct? - Fact or assumption? What evidence supports this thought? - Have you failed every test you’ve taken?

Probably not.

Think about some alternatives to create a balanced way of thinking. Some alternatives could be, what would you tell a friend who was having the same thought? You would likely be a lot kinder to them than you are to yourself.

Some thought records for yourself are:

• “I’ve studied hard, and I will do my best. ”

• “Even if I don’t get the score I want, it’s not the end of the world.”

Lastly, CBT isn’t just about psychological strategies, but physical ones as well. Managing the physical symptoms of anxiety can be things like your heart pounding or your mind racing. Try some simple grounding exercises to help you during the test:

Deep breathing - Take a second, do some breathing patterns, and repeat, which will actually calm your nervous system down!

Focus on yourself - It’s easy to get distracted by what is happening around you. Some people may be moving faster or slower compared to you, which can slowly make you spiral. If you keep your mind on your test and hone in on yourself, this pulls you out of the future and into the present moment.

You got this:

Remember that these skills take time and repetition; you won’t master them overnight. But if you start applying them when you can, you will be better prepared if the anxiety starts to stress you out. The goal isn’t to eliminate anxiety as a whole, but to learn to manage it so it doesn’t control you!