Overcoming Procrastination: A Guide To Beating Exam Fever
Introduction
Exam fever is a term one uses to refer to the gamut of emotions you experience when faced with an examination. This exam stress causes you to experience anxiety and depression and loss of control all at once. This can have a strong impact on your ability to prepare for your assignments and exams, as well as negatively affect your levels of performance and sense of well-being in general. The most common feature of exam stress is fear. Fear causes the release of adrenalin in the brain. This pushes the brain into a ‘fight or flight’ syndrome. This means that your brain then concentrates of defending itself from physical dangers. In order to do this, the blood rushes into your limbs and prepares you for a physical tackle, and not the brain where it is actually required. While it prepares for combat, if the need arises, it may also instruct the body for ‘flight’. This doesn’t mean you can fly. It means you need to escape from the perceived physical dangers and so the blood rush to the limbs once again makes sense. Why does it keep perceiving physical dangers, you may ask. Well, it’s one of our most primitive senses taking over. Go back to ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’ and it’ll fall into place for you.
Your brain translates to stress in its most basic sense. More specifically in the brain, the stress response induces alterations in cellular excitability as well as synaptic and neuronal plasticity. This in turn hampers the cognitive abilities and adaptability of the brain. This also discontinues the ability to learn, comprehend and recall previously learned information. This can often leave you feeling lost, irritable, in deep distress, and even forgetful. This is the cause of careless mistakes, and not being able to follow up well on a topic that you may otherwise be well versed in.
As a coping mechanism, one may push positive thoughts over the edge. Assuming that all will be well and that nothing can possibly go wrong. This gives birth to overconfidence, which has its own repercussions.
Solutions
Fear Tactics:
Exams are not meant to scare you. They are meant to test how much you have been able to intake during your academic sessions. If you pay attention in class and learn to understand, you are good to go. If you are a keen learner, then this would actually be an exciting time for you. Think about it like this, you have been soaking in all the information for months on end, now you get a chance to express how well you understood it all. Your chance to finally speak up!
Strategic Advances:
Systematic intake is what is suggested for the year-round strategy. But at the fag-end if you want to prepare yourself for the final lap, study an overview of your topic. This will help you revise and revisit points that your revision may have missed out on.
Stop-Breathe-Focus:
When the adrenalin rushes inside, you will be compelled towards worry, anxiety, and irritability. Chances are that your vision may blur a bit and the blood rush to limbs that we discussed earlier may cause sweaty palms. Gripping your pen or writing smoothly may also be affected. At this point take a 30-sec break. Stop doing or thinking whatever you are doing or thinking. Take 5 long breaths, slow and deliberate. Draw attention to the topic at hand and begin writing. This gives your brain the reboot you can afford and desperately need at such a time.
Visual Reset:
When stress is detected by the brain it is flushed with cortisol. This hampers your ability to recall information, which can be detrimental to your answering ability in the exam. Close your eyes for a few seconds, place your hand’s palms down on the table, and focus on your breathing. Once you regulate your racing breath, you will be able to reconnect with all the stored information well.
Conclusion
Exams are a time for finishing a year-long trek with knowledge, a journey that got you to learn yet another bit about your environment and surroundings. It’s about getting ready to move on to the next academic adventure that your being is slowly treading towards, and many more feats ahead. So, gear up, get up and let’s conquer the world!
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