Students really enjoy this time of year: the exams. While you are studying for days at a time, you still suffer from. performance anxiety. During studying, you often bite your nails or experience a lot of stress. This stress increases as the exams draw closer. It often occurs that students are exhausted in the middle of their exam period and are hardly able to study due to their performance anxiety. Performance anxiety namely has a large negative impact on your general functioning and even on your learning capacities. Have you ever noticed that it becomes more difficult to study when performance anxiety hits? Furthermore, chances of a black-out occurring become larger.
What is performance anxiety?
Performance anxiety is an unhealthy type of anxiety, which will reduce your ability to perform. It has many negative consequences, such as hyperventilation, black-out, or simply skipping an exam. Performance anxiety is closely linked with poor self-esteem and experiencing pressure. Thus, people who constantly repeat for themselves that they cannot do it, have a larger chance of experiencing symptoms of performance anxiety.
Who risks experiencing performance anxiety?
Anyone can experience performance anxiety at some point in their lives. These are not only students, who experience performance anxiety. Performance anxiety can develop in any type of performance. Generally, people who value performing well a lot, have larger chances of experiencing performance anxiety. This does not mean that you will definitely experience performance anxiety if you find school important, however. It mainly concerns how you deal with stress. A good way of dealing with stress is playing sports, for example. This empties your head and rests your brain. However, there are also unhealthy ways of coping with stress, which can lead to performance anxiety.
How do I treat performance anxiety?
You can treat performance anxiety by learning to recognize stress and anxiety early on. It is also useful to learn a healthy way of dealing with stress. This way, you reduce the chances of performance anxiety occurring and you even make your study period more of a pleasant time. You can follow 15 Minutes 4 Me in order to treat performance anxiety, for example. 15 Minutes 4 Me is an online self-help program which teaches you healthy ways of dealing with anxiety and stress. You can keep using these techniques for the rest of your life, so that you never have to experience performance anxiety again. Take the free anxiety test and find out which symptoms of anxiety you experience!
