How to Eliminate GMAT Test-Day Anxiety

Last Updated on May 12, 2023

A little bit of test-day anxiety is natural and expected for even the most well-prepared GMAT-taker. After all, the GMAT can have a significant impact on your admission to business school. However, too much anxiety on test-day has the potential to cloud your concentration and derail your GMAT performance.

If you are a student who tends to worry about your GMAT score or get stressed or anxious while taking the GMAT, keep reading. In this article, we’ll look at a number of practical and actionable strategies to help you eliminate test-day anxiety and perform at your highest level.

Let’s start by taking a look at some common symptoms of test-day anxiety.

Signs and Symptoms of Test-Day Anxiety

Test-day anxiety can affect the mind and body in numerous ways. Some common signs and symptoms include:

• Your mind feels blank while taking the test.
• It’s hard to make sense of the questions. You read and reread, but you just can’t figure out what the questions are asking.
• After the fact, you reflect on the questions and know that you had the ability to answer them correctly, although you couldn’t solve them in the moment.
• Your thoughts are racing and you feel unfocused.
• Your concentration level is poor.
• You’re worried about how you’re performing.
• Your breathing is faster than normal.
• Your heart rate is faster than normal.
• You feel tense.
• You feel lightheaded, faint, or dizzy.
• You’re sweating.
• You have cramps.
• You have dry mouth.

If you’ve experienced these symptoms while taking the GMAT (or a practice exam) or thinking about your upcoming exam, you may have been experiencing test anxiety.
Let’s look at what causes these symptoms.

Anxiety and the Fight-or-Flight Response

A little bit of anxiety is good, as it is a normal physiological response to situations that could result in harm and thus require a heightened state of alertness from our bodies. Anxiety increases our level of awareness, our visual and auditory sensations, and our processing skills. However, as our level of anxiety increases, we can see a steep drop in our performance. This drop in performance is attributed to what is known as the fight-or-flight response.

During the fight-or-flight response, our bodies prepare to either fight a threat or escape from it. A number of physiological processes occur to ready us to fight or flee: digestion shuts off (no time to eat while running from a lion), pupils dilate to temporarily enhance our vision, glucose and stress-hormone levels rise to provide energy to our muscles, and blood leaves certain regions of the brain that focus on higher-level thought, flooding the muscles, heart, and lungs and readying the body for a physical confrontation.

The fight-or-flight response is an evolutionary adaptation that likely served us well in the distant past, during an encounter with a bear or a rival clan looking to steal our food, but it isn’t always appropriate in our modern lives. If you’ve ever been angry and said something quickly that you later regretted, your outburst was likely the result of the decreased cognitive functions that result from the fight-or-flight response. Our fight-or-flight response is triggered in seconds, but its effects last well beyond the point at which a threat, or perceived threat, has disappeared.

When taking the GMAT, if your anxiety level is too high, your fight-or-flight response may kick in and make it difficult to focus on the problem at hand. Blood is leaving part of your brain to be available to your muscles. It’s obvious to say that on the GMAT, your brain is your most powerful asset. After all, you don’t reason through an algebra problem with your quadriceps. Those can help you land a spinning roundhouse kick on an enemy, but they’re not so useful in helping you set up an equation.

One of the keys to earning your highest possible score on the GMAT (aside from, of course, mastering GMAT content), is taking the necessary steps to minimize stress related to your exam and mitigate any anxiety that arises on the big day. Luckily, there are simple yet effective strategies that all GMAT students can follow to help decrease their test anxiety and increase their scores.

Strategy One: Be Prepared

The better you know the material, the more relaxed you’ll be on GMAT test day. This is the most obvious yet overlooked strategy to reduce GMAT anxiety. Consider a 31-question math test on basic multiplication and division. Would you be nervous about taking that test? Perhaps a few people would be, but most people are very comfortable with multiplication and division. How did they achieve this comfort? Well, they’ve been practicing multiplication and division for many years. That is, they are well-prepared to tackle questions involving those operations.

Now, change those 31 math questions to ones involving number properties, roots and exponents, divisibility, shaded regions, and probability, and all of a sudden, people get a little nervous. Why? Well, they know that they are not that strong with those concepts. Their bodies know this fact, too, and their bodies are telling them that this test is a momentous one and they may not be prepared to effectively handle its challenges. That’s stressful!

So, what do you do? Prepare, prepare, prepare! Then, after you have prepared enough, prepare some more. There is nothing better for combating test anxiety than to be so prepared that the material is no longer a source of stressful. Here is a good strategy: Don’t practice until you can get questions right; practice so much that you can’t get them wrong.

Once you know in your heart of hearts that you are properly prepared for the GMAT, the test won’t be that anxiety-provoking. In fact, it may even be enjoyable. After all, you’ll be able to put all of your hard work to good use and show the test what you’re made of!

In addition to being as comfortable as possible with GMAT content, you must be comfortable with the test-taking experience in order to reduce anxiety on GMAT test day. Achieving this level of comfort requires practice.

Strategy Two: Take Many Practice Tests

There is an old saying in sports: “You won’t play any better than you practice.” In other words, if you take a lackluster approach to your training, don’t expect to perform well on game day. The GMAT is no different. There are students who do a lot of preparation with GMAT material yet fail to take enough practice tests before the real deal. This is a bankrupt strategy. If a boxer builds great technique and stamina on the heavy and speed bags, but never gets in the ring to spar prior to fight night, how well can the real fight go?

Taking (and reviewing) all six official practice tests from mba.com is an excellent way to reduce test anxiety because you build comfort and familiarity with the GMAT that you can’t get from simply doing problem sets or untimed practice. When you take many full-length practice tests under realistic testing conditions, you desensitize yourself to the process of taking the GMAT. Thus, to a large degree, you make the real GMAT feel like just another day and just another practice test.

For example, one of my former GMAT students told me that the test center where she took her GMAT was so cold that she had to wear her coat to take the exam. Meanwhile, she had not slept well the night before. However, as a person who had started off with low confidence in her test-taking skills, she had taken many practice tests, and she realized that this day was not much different from many others on which she had awakened, eaten breakfast, and taken a practice GMAT. So, in spite of issues that she could have responded to by becoming anxious, she exceeded her dream score that day.

Of course, it’s essential to properly plan and space out your practice tests, so that you can leverage them to your greatest advantage. Check out this article for more advice on how to use GMAT practice tests to help reach your score goal.

Strategy Three: Visualize Success

The best of the best in any field know that battles are won and lost in the time leading up to the battle. Often, people mistakenly believe that winning or losing has everything to do with the battle itself. We know that preparation and practice are crucial, but if you don’t believe in your ability to succeed, you could be sabotaging yourself before you even get the chance to put your skills to work. You must visualize yourself being successful. You must visualize yourself correctly answering questions on the GMAT and earning a high score. You must feel it and believe it.

Many top professional athletes use visualization to gain a game-day edge. The human brain is an amazing machine, and we often underestimate the large role that our thoughts play in our performance. Remember that your thoughts become your actions, and your actions become your life. You have a choice as to how you feel. If you believe that you cannot lose, you’re all but guaranteed to perform at your best.

For 15 minutes each day, visualize your success. If you have never tried this before or are skeptical as to the efficacy of visualization, you are the person most in need of this exercise. You need not do anything sophisticated. Visualization can be as simple as sitting quietly for five minutes at a time, three times a day, and thinking positively. You could visualize:

• Little elves placing necessary GMAT knowledge in your brain.
• Remembering everything you learn during the study process.
• Developing a deep mastery of the material.
• Recognizing and knowing how to solve all of the questions you encounter on test day.
• Being happy and feeling positive during the test.
• Being fast and accurate during the test.
• Walking out of the test center feeling amazing with an exceptional GMAT score in hand.
• Writing your essays knowing that you’ve already earned a great GMAT score.

Another type of visualization that you can do to reduce test anxiety relates to what is called exposure therapy.

Strategy Four: Exposure Therapy

Exposure therapy involves changing fearful or self-sabotaging responses by putting the people in situations that trigger those responses, thus creating opportunities to practice responding differently. For instance, a person who is afraid of heights would spend some time in high places learning to manage that response.

Interestingly, merely visualizing being in a situation that triggers an anxious response can produce the same response that actually being in that situation does. So, to learn to stay cool while taking the GMAT, you can imagine that you are taking the GMAT, and feel and learn to manage any anxious responses that arise. If, when you think of the test, career-related pressure triggers anxious feelings, you could visualize yourself taking the test and feeling that pressure, and practice acknowledging that feeling without becoming anxious. You could visualize yourself getting an easy question and wondering whether that is a sign that you didn’t get the previous question correct. How do you respond to that situation? How do you want to respond?

You can take this type of “soft” exposure therapy to a fairly sophisticated level by doing things such as looking at pictures of the interiors of test centers. There are plenty such pictures available online. How do you respond to seeing those test centers? How do you want to respond? Practice responding the way you want to respond.

You could even drive to the test center a few times. During the drive, practice feeling confident and ready to take the test.

The basic idea is to get used to handling the things that you respond to anxiously until you don’t respond that way any longer. As you do this exposure therapy, don’t seek to repress anxiety; rather, notice how you are responding and sit with any anxiety you feel until you calm down. You can also think about how you respond and consider alternative ideas, for instance, that becoming anxious over your career goals is not doing you any good. Can you talk yourself out of becoming anxious? Essentially, yes, you can.

Of course, if you want to be less anxious about the GMAT, recognizing and limiting anxiety in all areas of your life can help.

Strategy Five: Recognize and Limit Anxiety in Your Life

If you’re a person who tends to get anxious and stressed throughout the day, if you let the small stuff bother you, it’s going to be difficult to walk into the test center and be cool. After all, each day you’re training your body to be on edge.

If you allow yourself to be flustered by every gust of wind that comes your way, you’re going to be blown off course. Your strategy is to try to remain calm each day. There are many books and courses that can teach you to better manage stress. There are strategies you can employ to be calm under fire. For example:

• Work to be more patient with the people around you. Don’t allow yourself to be rattled by little annoyances such as a friend’s being late to meet you or a disagreement with a family member. Make a conscious effort to keep your cool, and recognize that doing so may actually help the situation. Your boss is being a jerk? Perfect; use that as an opportunity to improve your people skills. Make it your goal to become your boss’s favorite person in the office.
• Develop the ability to be comfortable sitting in traffic. What good does getting flustered do? Stress won’t get you to your destination any quicker. Do the same for delayed flights and long lines at the supermarket — just be cool.
• Practice not being hard on yourself during the study process. If you get a question wrong, don’t agonize; use it as a learning experience. If preparing for the GMAT is taking longer than you planned, recognize that this process can be unpredictable, and continue to do your best.
• In general, realize that the problems and situations that are stressing you out are probably quite small compared to those you could face.

While it’s important that you don’t let little annoyances derail your day, you should also seek to transform your pessimistic thought patterns related to the GMAT.

Strategy Six: Rethink Hazardous Attitudes

Often, it’s not the difficulties we face in life that cause us the greatest problems. Rather, it’s the way we view those difficulties — our attitude in the face of challenges — that proves most problematic. For example, students who experience test anxiety tend to exhibit a wide range of negative, harmful thought patterns, which we’ll collectively refer to as “hazardous attitudes.” Common examples of these hazardous attitudes include:

I’m bad at math and I’ll never improve.

The GMAT is too hard. I’ll never be able to improve my score.

The GMAT is stupid. Why do I have to spend my time studying for this test?

I’ll never be able to answer GMAT questions quickly enough.

I really dislike studying. It’s such a waste of time.

The material that I learn while studying for the GMAT won’t be useful to me in business school or in life.

I can’t remain calm and focused while taking the GMAT.

Students who score well on the GMAT tend not to engage in this negative self-talk. Instead, they view the GMAT dispassionately, even positively. They are rational, realistic, and optimistic when it comes to their current skill sets, score goals, and the time and energy that will be required to reach their goals. Examples of their self-talk include:

At this moment, I need to improve my math skills. With hard work and time, I can improve them to a very high level.

Yes, the GMAT is hard, but I’m up for the challenge. Nothing valuable in life comes to anyone without hard work.

I can use the GMAT as a tool to help gain a seat at a top business school. I’m not entitled to anything unless I’m willing to spend the time to earn it.

At the moment, I may not be fast at solving GMAT questions, but I can and will get better and faster each day. In time, I will be fast and accurate.

Although studying may not be as much fun as taking tequila shots, I realize that in today’s world, knowledge is power, and having more of it can provide me with a major competitive advantage over my peers.

The GMAT tests reading skills, writing skills, logic skills, critical-reasoning skills, and quantitative analysis skills, all of which are vital to success in business school and beyond.

The GMAT may be a big deal, but there are many steps that I can take, both in my studying and while taking the test, that will help me to stay calm, ready, and focused.

If you’ve ever found yourself engaged in detrimental self-talk, that’s OK. Recognizing hazardous attitudes is the first step toward eliminating them. Pay close attention to your self-talk, and each time you catch yourself engaged in a hazardous attitude, stop and write it down on the left side of a page in a journal. Then, on the right side of the page, next to the hazardous attitude, come up with a restatement of that attitude. For example:

Any time you fall prey to hazardous attitudes, take note and perform a restatement in your journal. As you perform this task over and over, you’ll likely begin to notice that your view on the GMAT, the study process, and even yourself is moving in a positive direction, which will decrease your anxiety.

Just as you can transform your negative thoughts into positive ones, you can transform anxiety into excitement. Let’s look at how.

Strategy Seven: Transform Anxiety Into Excitement

Research by Alison Wood Brooks, professor at Harvard Business School, supports the notion that by simply getting excited about a stressful task, you can improve your performance on that task.

According to Brooks, many people think that the best way to heighten their performance under stress is to try to calm themselves down. To the contrary, Brooks’ research uncovered something interesting: People who got excited in anticipation of a stressful task, rather than trying to calm down, actually performed better. Brooks says: “Individuals can reappraise anxiety as excitement using minimal strategies such as self-talk (e.g., saying ‘I am excited’ out loud) or simple messages (e.g., ‘get excited’), which lead them to feel more excited, adopt an opportunity mind-set (as opposed to a threat mind-set), and improve their subsequent performance.”

In one experiment, Brooks looked at how reappraising anxiety as excitement helped graduate students perform better under strict time pressure on difficult math problems. (Sound familiar?) Before solving any problems, one group of students would say the phrase “try to remain calm” out loud, while the other would exclaim, “try to get excited.” Brooks found that the students instructed to say “try to get excited” performed significantly better than the other group.

In another experiment, Jeremy Jamieson, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester, studied college students preparing for the GRE. Jamieson divided the students into two groups and had each group take a practice GRE. He told one of the groups about new research suggesting that stress could actually be helpful to exam performance. In addition, he told the group that if they noticed themselves experiencing stress during the exam, they should remind themselves that the stress may actually be helping them to perform better. The control group did not receive this pep talk. Jamieson found that the group that received the pep talk scored higher on the practice GRE than the control group did. About a month later, both groups took the official GRE. Jamieson then reviewed both groups’ ETS score reports (the ETS writes and administers the GRE). He found that the group that had received the pep talk performed significantly better on the quant section of the GRE than the control group did.

So, what are the key takeaways? First, if you’re feeling stressed about taking the GMAT, it may help to tell yourself that what you’re feeling is actually excitement. Each time you sit down to practice solving GMAT problems, try saying something like, “I’m excited about mastering these GMAT questions,” or “I’m pumped about studying for the GMAT,” or “I’m excited about scoring high on the GMAT.” Find a mantra that works for you. Use that same mantra prior to taking your actual GMAT. Then, if you find yourself stressing out during the official GMAT, you can take a moment to remind yourself that the stress is likely working in your favor by keeping you on your toes.

Similarly, you can also manage your stress level by repeating a positive mantra.

Strategy Eight: Make Up a Mantra

Positive affirmations can help with test anxiety. Think of a mantra that you like and repeat it throughout each day. For example: “In all ways, I will crush the GMAT” or “nothing can keep me from a 700+ GMAT score.” Keep repeating your mantra in your mind. Over time, you will likely come to believe it.

You can also employ a different positive affirmation if and when you feel too much anxiety rearing its head. This is an affirmation that you can use to re-center yourself if you’re getting off track. For example: “I am a master of this content. I am very prepared.” As soon as you feel your emotions getting away from you, repeat that mantra to help yourself refocus.

Another mantra that can be very effective in a variety of situations, including taking the GMAT, is: “I can handle this.”

Now, let’s look at the importance of controlled breathing.

Strategy Nine: Be Aware of Your Breathing

We’ve already discussed that breathing faster than normal is a common symptom of test anxiety, so it’s no surprise that people who are calm tend to breathe deeply. Interestingly, mimicking the behavior of calm people by taking long, deep, full breaths, can actually make you calmer. When you engage in the type of breathing that calm people do, you deliver more oxygen to your brain and calm your system. In this case, “fake it ‘til you make it” is worthwhile advice.

So, whether you are taking the actual GMAT or a practice test, or even just doing some concept review, to put yourself in a calm state that is optimal for learning and problem-solving, breathe deeply, so that the breaths don’t stop in your chest but go lower, into your abdominal area. Doing this type of breathing is one of the simplest, fastest, and most effective ways to reduce anxiety.

This brings us to an essential strategy when taking the GMAT: Get busy answering questions.

Strategy Ten: Eat Anxiety for Lunch by Getting Busy Answering Questions

All of the strategies we’ve discussed so far have focused on reducing anxiety to optimal levels. However, what if you were to do all of the above and still found yourself becoming anxious while taking the actual GMAT? Is it game over? Definitely not.

In coaching people taking the GMAT, we at Target Test Prep realized something: Eliminating test anxiety entirely is pretty much impossible, and the idea that you have to do so can be debilitating because if you find yourself becoming anxious while taking the test, you may decide that you have already lost the game. So, eliminating all anxiety is not the goal. Rather, the goal — and a key part of winning the GMAT game — is to deal with any anxiety that you do experience.

So, what do you do if you feel yourself becoming anxious while taking the actual GMAT? First, don’t be anxious about being anxious. As we’ve already learned, some degree of anxious alertness can be beneficial. Furthermore, responding to anxiety by becoming anxious over the anxiety clearly doesn’t help. Instead, get busy. Focus on the question in front of you so intensely that you don’t even notice whether you’re anxious or calm.

Focusing on the question in front of you is a great test-taking strategy for a variety of reasons, and one of them is that in doing so, you will be too busy to make yourself more anxious. The intense focus on a purpose will serve to calm you by distracting you from your feelings of anxiety. Whether you’re taking a practice test or the real test, you can adopt the following attitude: Whatever is going on, focus on getting the right answer to the question in front of you. The temperature in the test center is a bit lower than is comfortable for you? Focus on the getting the right answer to the question in front of you. Worried about your career goals? Focus on getting the right answer to the question in front of you. Feeling tired? Focus on getting the right answer to the question in front of you. Worried that you won’t get into your first-choice business school? You can fall apart or pass out after the last question in the last section has been answered. While you are taking the test, focus on the question at hand and nothing else.

Online there is a popular debrief written by someone who scored 800 on the GMAT. Guess how he calmed his pre-test nerves on the big day? He did some practice questions! If you can get into the habit of calming yourself by working on getting the right answers to questions, you are set. So, make seeking right answers your response to test anxiety. If your habitual response to feeling anxious is to work on getting right answers, that is what you will do when you are taking the test.

Strategy Eleven: Eliminate the Need for Perfection

Everyone wants everything done perfectly and done yesterday. Great. Now that we have that fact on the table, let’s get real: Nothing is done perfectly, and things often take longer than anticipated. Most things in life that are valuable, such as earning an MBA from a top business school, finishing the Boston Marathon, or finding your soulmate, are not easy to achieve. They can require a significant investment of time and hard work.

Here we see another major difference in the thinking of students who experience test anxiety and those who don’t: The former have a need to be perfect. Along with this perfection comes a need to get things done as fast as humanly possible. This is a lose-lose scenario when preparing for the GMAT.

Students who strive for perfection see every question that they incorrectly answer as an affront to their vision of how they should perform and how events are “supposed to” unfold, rather than as an opportunity to improve. They see a question that they take longer than two minutes to answer as a sign that they are not “where they need to be,” instead of seeing those questions as a natural part of the learning and growth that comes with studying for the GMAT. When they take their first practice test and score, for example, 680, they view this score as “100 points below 780,” instead of realizing that 680 is a great starting score, that almost no students need to score 780 on the GMAT to secure a seat at a top business school, and that only a tiny handful of students will be able to earn such a score, even with serious study.

With each affront to the students’ perfectionist worldview, their anxiety grows, doing a disservice to their GMAT preparation and their performance on test day. Don’t fall into the trap of believing that you or anyone else taking the GMAT can and must achieve perfection.

As a corollary to getting rid of the need to be perfect, you can leverage what is known as the compound effect.

Strategy Twelve: Leverage the Compound Effect

The compound effect says that small, continuous changes over time can produce dramatic results. For example, imagine if you cut your daily caloric intake by just 100 calories a day for six months? How many pounds would you lose? Imagine if you learned one line of a piano song each day? How many songs would you be able to play after a year?

We can apply this principle to GMAT prep. Sometimes students feel that they must study five hours a day in order to make progress, so on days when they can’t devote five hours, they simply don’t study. These missed study days foster anxiety that can spill over into test day. These students are missing out on the compound effect.

Perhaps some busy students can study for only 30 minutes in the morning and 40 minutes at night. Even so, if they consistently study 70 minutes a day over the course of some months, they can develop a strong skillset.

Even if you can’t carve out as much study time each day as you’d like, by consistently studying a little each day, you can make large improvements in your skills.

Now that we know that studying a little is always better than not studying at all, let’s discuss some other myths and misconceptions surrounding the GMAT.

Strategy Thirteen: Separate Fact From Fiction

Standardized tests tend to become sensationalized. As a result, there is no shortage of false information about the GMAT. This false information often creates unnecessary anxiety in students. Let’s take a look at some common GMAT falsehoods and the GMAT reality:

Fiction: The GMAT measures how good I am at taking standardized tests.
Fact: Every question on the GMAT is designed to test a specific concept, skill, or chunk of knowledge.

Fiction: If I’m not a fast worker, I won’t be able to earn a good GMAT score.
Fact: GMAT questions are designed to be solvable by well-prepared test-takers in the time provided.

Fiction: The GMAT tests an obscure body of information, and its questions depend upon my knowing the “tricks” that are used to solve them.
Fact: The information tested on the GMAT is extremely pertinent to the success of MBA students and business people. Furthermore, the questions have logical, methodical solutions. There are no secret “tricks” to getting correct answers.

Fiction: I must get every question correct to earn a high score.
Fact: On an adaptive test such as the GMAT, you can incorrectly solve a number of questions and still earn a high score.

Fiction: If I don’t do well on the first ten questions, I won’t be able to earn a high score.
Fact: The first ten questions do not determine your quant score. All of the questions are important.

Fiction: When I take the GMAT, I am “playing against the computer.”
Fact: The computer only facilitates the test and provides you with a score. In reality, you are “playing” against your peers. If you are more skilled than they are, you’ll outscore them.

Fiction: If I don’t score 750+ on the GMAT, I won’t get into business school.
Fact: Although the GMAT is a major component of the business school admissions process, it’s only one facet of a student’s application. There are many people who have earned a 750 and not gotten into HBS, for example. Similarly, there are many people with sub-700 GMAT scores who have earned seats at HBS.

Fiction: Because the GMAT is a reasoning test, it does not test content. Rather, it tests how well I think. Since it’s hard to improve my thinking skills, it’s hard to improve my score.
Fact: Yes, the GMAT is a reasoning test, and logical reasoning, analytical reasoning, and critical reasoning are all major skills tested. However, you can learn to be a better thinker by mastering predictably tested pieces of knowledge. Once you master this knowledge, you’ll be able to increase your skill at getting questions correct. There are many tangible facts, concepts, and thinking skills that you can learn, all of which will help you improve your score.

Fiction: I can’t benefit from my Enhanced Score Report if I cancel my GMAT score at the test center.
Fact: You can access and learn from your Enhanced Score Report regardless of whether you cancel your score at the test center.

Fiction: The Sentence Correction portion of the GMAT is biased in favor of native speakers of English.
Fact: The Sentence Correction portion of the GMAT is equally accessible to test-takers regardless of their native language.

When you hear or read something about GMAT, take a moment to be sure that the information you’re getting is accurate.
Sometimes, you may hear tales of other people’s GMAT success. Whether those stories are accurate or urban legend, you should resist the urge to compare yourself to others when preparing for the GMAT.

Strategy Fourteen: Don’t Compare Yourself to Others

Theodore Roosevelt famously said that “comparison is the thief of joy.” Well, comparison also has the potential to detract from your GMAT performance. In preparing for such a significant test, it’s easy to compare yourself to your peers. Maybe your friend earned a 730. Maybe your colleague took the test after studying for only a month and earned a high score. Who cares! These people are not you. All you can control is yourself, so don’t waste your limited time and energy comparing yourself to anyone except the best version of yourself. Also, ignore the stories about people who scored 700+ after one week of studying. First, you have no way of knowing whether these stories are true. Second, even if the stories are true, those people are extremely rare. Comparing yourself to them is like comparing yourself to Tiger Woods while playing golf; you’ll always feel inadequate no matter how good you get.

Comparing yourself to others can worsen your GMAT anxiety, so do yourself a favor and focus on your personal goals. That said, it’s smart to have a backup plan (or two) just in case things don’t turn out the way you were hoping they would on test day.

Strategy Fifteen: Have a Plan B and a Plan C

One of the most important steps you can take to help eliminate test anxiety is to have a Plan B and a Plan C. Consider a scenario in which you have one shot to take the GMAT just before the round two deadlines. If you do well, you think you’ll get into a great program. If you don’t do well, you feel your chances of acceptance are low. This is a stress-evoking situation for most people because so much rests on one test.

You don’t want to create a do-or-die situation. Instead, you want to have a backup plan. For example, if you don’t hit your GMAT score goal, a solid Plan B would be to continue studying until you earn a competitive score, and reapply in the fall for round one. Sit down and make a list of all the ways you can enhance yourself both personally and professionally during the coming year. In doing this exercise, you may see that waiting to go to school is a very positive move.

Last but not least, let’s look at one of the easiest strategies for reducing test-day anxiety: staying hydrated!

Strategy Sixteen: Hydrate

The sensation of thirst does not really appear until a person is 1% to 2% dehydrated, and studies have shown that even 1.5% dehydration can have a negative impact on a person’s mind and body. Tasks may seem more difficult than they normally would, and a mildly dehydrated person may be more likely to experience anxiety and tension.

Staying fully hydrated helps to keep you at peak performance and reduces physical stress. Of course, the method for addressing dehydration is simple. Drink some water before you take the GMAT, and maybe drink some during breaks. Don’t drink so much that it will make you uncomfortable during a 3 1/2-hour test, but make sure you drink enough to keep feelings of thirst and dry mouth at bay.

Employ these basic yet effective strategies to combat test anxiety, and before you know it, you’ll be cooler, calmer, and ready to win the GMAT game!

Need more advice on how to handle the days leading up to your exam? Check out these essential GMAT test-day tips and get set for test day with our checklist of what to bring to the test center.

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