Last Updated on October 6, 2023
Many people talk about anxiety or nervousness affecting their GMAT performance, and as you can imagine, when I’ve worked with people one on one, dealing with anxiety has often been one of our tasks.
So, time after time, we’ve done all kinds of things to reduce anxiety, such as working on people’s perceptions of themselves and of the test, using visualization and exposure therapy, and improving people’s GMAT skills so that they become more confident and, therefore, less likely to become anxious.
The Issue
All the same, at some point, I realized that we were running scared; we were anxious about anxiety. After all, what if, after doing all those things, a person still became anxious during the test? Then what? I was always worried that I’d hear from a student after a test that she or he had still become anxious and hadn’t performed up to her or his potential. Even after all that work, anxiety would have wrecked things again.
So – lightbulb – I realized that, while reducing anxiety is a great idea, we needed something else; we needed a strategy for dealing with anxiety in case, if in spite of all our work, a test-taker still experienced some anxiety, a response other that giving in to anxiety and giving up and trying again next time.
The Test-Day Anxiety Solution
So, what we came up with could be termed “the eat anxiety for lunch approach.” In other words, it turned out that part of the answer to dealing with anxiety is to learn to rock the test even if you are anxious. Of course, if you can rock the test even if you start feeling anxious, then anxiety is no longer your master.
And a key aspect of dealing with anxiety during the test is learning to ride out anxiety until it fades.
If you think about it, we’ve all had stressful, nerve-racking moments, days, or even weeks, but what we’ve all noticed is that stress and anxiety doesn’t last forever. After a while, it always fades, and we can use this phenomenon to our advantage when taking the GMAT. We can plan to ride out anxiety until it fades.
How? Rather than letting anxiety own us, we can choose to simply observe that we are anxious and then get to work focusing on finding the correct answer to the question in front of us, because no matter how anxious we are, if we decide that we are too busy to worry about anxiety and focus on using the skills we’ve developed while preparing for the GMAT, the anxiety will eventually fade because we’re directing our energy elsewhere and thus affirming that the anxiety is insignificant to us.
To achieve your GMAT potential, have an anxiety plan, and be ready to ride out anxiety until it fades.
So, yes, if you tend to get anxious when taking a test like the GMAT, by all means, do visualization, psychological work, and other things to eliminate test day anxiety, but also, have an anxiety plan. Plan to blow off anxiety by focusing on getting the correct answer to the question in front of you until the brain fog lifts, the anxiety fades, and you are back on track to achieving your goal.
