Test Anxiety can crush your GRE score. Here is a long-term plan to manage it for good.

Are you a GRE student who faces severe test anxiety but whose test is still at least two weeks away?

If yes, then this article – Part 2 of the two-part series on test anxiety – may help you. In it, I will share a research-backed action plan to address your performance anxiety thoroughly, over a few weeks.

Table of Contents

The Big Idea – Journal Daily!

In Part 1 of the two-part series, we established that expressive writing could alleviate the negative impact of test anxiety. If you spend some time on the morning of your test-day in writing about your fears around test performance, your score may go up by as much as 5 points!

The question naturally arises that if this thing works, then why do it just when you are very close to the test? Should a diabetic only use insulin in an emergency when his blood sugar level has shot up to a dangerous level? Would it not instead be wiser to follow a self-care routine that prevents the emergency from ever arising?

Could a longer-term plan based on the idea of expressive writing not help you to not feel so anxious about your score in the first place? I believe it could and my agenda for this article is to share such a plan with you.

This plan is more nuanced than the idea of just venting out your test-related worries that I shared in Part 1, because of two reasons:

  • For how many days can you keep venting before you start to repeat yourself or become bored of the exercise and give it up altogether? To give direction to your writing and to stimulate new thoughts, I share interesting prompts that will make you look at the problem of test anxiety from angles that you may not have considered before.
  • When you write on the morning of the GRE, all your fears and anxieties are highly salient in your mind, but when the test is far away, you may need some prodding, some help, to remember them vividly.
  • While writing down the worries is itself helpful, you cannot solve your worries in 10 minutes. To reduce or eliminate your worries for good, you need to probe them patiently over a few weeks. And for that you need a plan.

But, before we begin, let’s address the question that might be on your mind:

Why should you work on your test anxiety today when there are a thousand other tasks already vying for their share in the limited pie of 18 waking hours available to you?

That’s a good question.

You are able to consistently pull in tens or hundreds of hours from your busy life and put them into your GRE quant and verbal prep, because you know the value add that those hours would do to your life, by way of an improved score, desired admissions, and ensuing career success. What will be the impact of investing precious prep time into working on your test anxiety? It will be the same that a bank gets from investing precious resources into its security infrastructure. If your performance anxiety hijacks your brain on the test day, all the effort, sweat and attention that you so diligently deposited into your GRE prep account may come to a nought.

Does a thing that can bring your score down on the test day not deserve your careful attention? Accepting that it does is the first step towards the solution. If you are weak in RC but want to improve your verbal score by 5 points, how much time will you spend in RC practice every day? If you are prone to test anxiety and this is something that can decrease your score by 5 points, does this problem not deserve a 15-minute slot within your daily GRE prep regimen?

Start a dedicated journal in which you will write during this 15-minute slot.

What will you journal about?

Slot #1

In the 15-minute journaling slot on the first day, simply narrate what happened during a particular episode of test anxiety.

Putting all these whirling amorphous thoughts out of your head will itself do you good; the unknown, shapeless monster is always the most frightening. Giving it a tangible shape and form already begins to make it seem less unmanageable.

From the second day, you will do the Laddering Exercise, as explained below.

Slot #2 onwards: The Laddering Exercise

The Laddering Exercise will take a good number of journaling slots. This is what you should do.

Start referring, one by one, to the anxieties you wrote about in your journal the previous day, and go deeper into each, asking the question “What does it mean to me?”

Here is an example:

  • “This test is going to go badly.”
    • What does it mean to me?
    • “It means that I will not get an admission to any good school this year.”
      • What does it mean to me?
    • “It means that I am going to stay stuck in my present job.”
      • What does it mean to me?
    • “It means that while my friends go on to have shiny careers and pay packages, I will be a lowly wage slave.”
      • What does it mean to me?
    • “It means that everyone will look down upon me.”
      • What does it mean to me?
    • “It means that I will feel like a terrible failure.”
      • What does it mean to me?
    • “It means that I will start believing that I am doomed to be a mediocrity all my life and will stop making efforts to take on new challenges.”
      • What does it mean to me?
    • “It means mind-deadening stagnation!”
      • What does it mean to me?
    • “It means a wasted life!”

The deeper fears and self-limiting beliefs take time, effort and patience to uncover. The deeper you go down this ladder of the “what does it mean to me” questions, the more you discover your innermost thoughts and the unexamined assumptions that drive the fearful voices you hear in your head about the GRE.

Through this exercise, the hypothetical student in the above example will realize that it is not really the GRE score that he is worried about but the prospect of wasting his life!

Now that this formerly subconscious thought-process has become explicit and is ‘out there’ on his journal pages, he can question it and actively try to change it.

How? By asking “Is that true?” for each response written for the ‘what does it mean to me?’ question. Here is what I mean:

  • “I will not get an admission to any good school this year.”
    • Is that true?
    • Not really. Schools look at the whole profile and not just the GRE scores. I guess if I do a good job with my essays and any interview invites that I get, I might still make it this year.
  • “I am going to stay stuck in my present job.”
    • Is that true?
    • No. I can switch jobs and even get a nice salary jump, like my friend ______. And next year, I will apply again to my goal schools.  
  • “While my friends go on to have shiny careers and pay packages, I will be a lowly wage slave.”
    • Is that true?
    • No. I am assuming that while my friends will keep striving to improve themselves, I will merely watch them passively, sitting still with my hands on my lap, bemoaning my bad luck. Have I ever behaved so passively till date?
  • “Everyone will look down upon me.”
    • Is that true?
    • No. My parents won’t, my family and my best friends won’t. Remember when I did poorly at ______? Did everyone look down upon me then? Other than these people, is anyone really going to spare their mental bandwidth to think about me, judge me adversely and then convey their derision to me?
  • “I will feel like a terrible failure.”
    • Is that true?
    • It’s true that I have felt like a terrible failure many times in my life. But that has always been situational, and the feeling lasted only a few days. For instance, remember ________. How crushed I had felt then. And yet, I survived that. I didn’t go on feeling like a terrible failure all the rest of my life, did I? If I didn’t do so then, is it likely that I will do so in this imaginary future? I don’t think so.
  • “I will start believing that I am doomed to be a mediocrity all my life and will stop making efforts to take on new challenges.”
    • Is that true?
    • How do I define ‘a mediocrity’? Through the eyes of the world, which sees flashy job titles and degrees and material prosperity as the sign of success? Or, through the eyes of the person-judged-as-mediocre? I know _______, whom the world may judge as mediocre as per the world’s criteria, but perhaps not the whole world, because ‘I’ for one don’t think she is mediocre. I respect her sincere dedication to her job and her creative solutions for some very difficult problems in her work environment. I don’t think she will judge herself to be mediocre either. Challenges exist in every set-up and if I keep engaging with them, I will keep my chances of being above-average alive.     
  • “Mind-deadening stagnation!”
    • Is that true?
    • No! opportunities to exercise my mind and hone my skills are going to keep presenting themselves all my life.    
  • “A wasted life!”
    • Is that true?
    • No! The degree of career success does not determine whether a life was lived well or wasted away. Geniuses may yet fail to live well; a semi-educated person in a remote village who devotes himself to taking care of leprosy patients may have a deeply meaningful and successful life, successful because he made the lives of others better.

If you think that your response to a particular ‘what does it mean to me?’ question is indeed indisputably true, consider discussing it with a loved one or a trusted friend, to confirm your hunch.

Probing prompts

Once you are done with the Laddering Exercise, you may use the journaling slots that remain till your test day to explore your test anxiety from interesting new angles, by using some or all of the following prompts one by one, in any order.

  • What is your identity? What are your positive attributes? What mnemonic/image/life-anecdote/song can remind you of these good attributes during a high-pressure moment when you are questioning/doubting yourself?

Take a few moments before your next test to remember that mnemonic/image/life-anecdote/song. Does it help you take the test with a lighter mind?

  • What ideas/techniques/exercises have helped you calmly face high pressure situations in your life till now? How might you apply them to the GRE test scenario?
  • List the factors involved in your test performance that you cannot control. List the factors involved that you can involved. Visualize the high-pressure moment; think about the things you can control, and imagine those going well. Now, think about the things you cannot control. Visualize your performance going astray. Bring your mind back into focus on what you can control, and visualize yourself getting back on track. Write about this visualization exercise in the journal.
  • What are your life goals? Who/what do you want to be? What behavior before and during the test will be in line with this personal mission and self-vision? What behavior will go against it?
  • Imagine yourself being the person you will be when you have achieved your dream success. Describe that image. Begin each study and test session by taking a deep breath and imagining yourself being that person. How will that person conduct themselves during the study/test? Can you not start being that person from today?
  • Is your dream Masters/PhD admit this year the only way to achieve your life goals? What other paths might be possible?
  • Imagine, in vivid detail, the scenario where you do not make it to your dream programs this year. What will life look like in that scenario? Might your life still be good enough and have things to be grateful about? List those things.
  • Imagine, in vivid detail, the following worst-case in-test scenarios. Think through what you will do in each case:
  1. The very first question in a quant/verbal section seems so incomprehensible that your brain freezes for a moment.
  2. You are way behind the desired milestone (for example, only 3 questions done out of the total 12 in the first quant section when the timer reads ‘11 minutes left’.
  3. The computer hangs or there is an internet glitch for some time during the test.
  4. Some person (student/invigilator) in the test center is quite noisy and is causing repeated distractions/disturbance to you.

Why journal daily?

You might see value in what I have said above and intend with all your heart to start a 15-minute Anxiety Journaling slot from tomorrow.

But when tomorrow comes, your “absolutely must-do’s” for the day may make it impossible for you to fulfill the self-promise to journal, and to feel better, you may now promise to do the slot for 15*2=30 minutes the next day. Only to have the same thing repeat the next day and then you may just tell yourself that you will make up for not doing the slot during the weekdays in one go on Sunday.

Is that okay? Is it important to journal for 15 minutes every day or might you achieve the same value each week by putting in 15*7 = 105 minutes on just Sunday?

My contention is that regularity does matter.

The time that you consciously put into journaling per day is just 15 minutes, but what you wrote about will linger in your subconscious the whole day and night. Later that day, a chance conversation that you have with a colleague during coffee break may give you a new perspective to the problem you were describing in your journal that morning; or perhaps, when watching your dinner-time web-series, you will find a scene to be a perfect parallel to your own GRE-related anxieties and the approach taken by a character in the series will suggest to you an approach that you could take, etc.

These are serendipitous insights. Serendipity, by definition, comes to the prepared mind – a mind that is so marinated in the problem that it sees, consciously or subconsciously, everything through the lens of that problem.

That’s how a mere spider could teach a valuable life-lesson to the Scottish king Robert Bruce. He may have looked at spiders falling during their attempt to spin a web before too, but on that special day, he saw, he paid attention. He saw because that day his mind, heavy with the dilemma of whether to continue fighting the English or to admit defeat, was receptive to the analogy between his situation and that of the spider; if the spider did not give up, should he? If the spider succeeded in the end, couldn’t he?

If you fulfill your journaling slot daily, you will be thinking about your test anxiety daily, and even after you move on to other tasks, your subconscious will quietly keep working on it in behind the curtains of your mind’s stage and, therefore, you will be receptive to any relevant comment, idea, poem, story or anecdote that comes your way that day.

If you think about your test anxiety only on Sunday, then, this state of receptivity will last till perhaps Monday night; after that, this issue will leave your mind’s theater altogether, the stage now occupied entirely – in front of the curtains and behind the curtains – by the more active, the more salient matters of that day. So, if on Thursday, you happen to be in a party where someone is telling the story of how they overcame their fear of flying, you may not even realize that you could have learnt something from that story as your test fears are not on your mind that day. You could not see the insight because you were not looking for it.  

“Everything that happens in my day is a transaction between the external world and my internal world. Everything is new material. Everything is relevant. Everything is usable. . . but without proper prep, I cannot see it, retain it, and use it. Without the time and effort invested in getting ready to create, you can be hit by the thunderbolt and it will just leave you stunned.”

Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit

What Tharp writes here for creative acts also applies, I believe, to problem-solving. Light-bulb moments come to people who enter the dark room and keep searching for the switch in the darkness till they find one.

So, 105 minutes spent journaling on Sunday are NOT the same as 15 minutes spent journaling every day. The hours per week that you will be thinking about the problem are only perhaps 24*2 in the case of the Sunday binge but 24*7 in the case of daily journaling.

How to ensure that you journal daily?

Till you have the option to not do a task, you may in fact end up not doing it. But, if the task becomes non-negotiable, then you will find a way to make it happen.

“Nothing surely is so potent as a law that may not be disobeyed. It has the force of the water-drop that hollows the stone. A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules.”  

Chapter 7, An Autobiography by Anthony Trollope

Accountability to journal daily may be:

Conclusion

Over this two-part article series, I hope that I have been able to establish that test anxiety is a manageable problem and that it is important for you to manage it, because otherwise it can negatively impact your score.

I am not a psychologist, so I do not know very many solutions for test anxiety, but I do know that for my own anxieties, I find it quite helpful to pour them into a journal; when the thoughts were just in my mind, they were a whirling, amorphous mass of negativity; the articulation gives them a shape, a structure, and that is helpful in itself, because now that the problem is out there, in a tangible, fixed form, I can do something about it. When I revisit the journal entry later, with a calmer mind (often though, such writing itself calms the mind), I can see patterns in my thoughts, I can organize them into bullet points and sub-bullets and can DO something about them.

The act of writing down your worries, as we saw in Part 1, is called Expressive Writing. If your test is very close, then doing just one session of expressive writing may help you feel much better and have a positive impact on your test score. If you have more time, though, then following the research-based ideas I shared in this article may be still more helpful.

References

  1. The idea of Laddering is taken from Chapter 6 of the book Coach Yourself, by Anthony M. Grant and Jane Green
  2. Most of the ‘probing prompts’ listed in this article are sourced from the book How to Perform under Pressure by Hendrie Weisinger and J.P. Pawliw-Fry. I have adapted some of the pressure solutions suggested in the book to the GRE test situation. I have also added some prompts of my own that my coaching students have found to be effective.