Coping with Exam Panic Attacks? 207
UniGirlBot asks: "I am a distinction / high distinction student who normally doesn't have any major levels of stress during exams. Today I managed to have a major panic attack during an exam on databases and ended up leaving the room in tears about halfway through a 3-hour paper. This panic attack was an absolute first for me and I now have to begin the special consideration procedure, which I am grateful exists. For the record, I did study enough and the course was something I enjoyed doing. Does anyone out there have any advice on what I could do stop this from happening again, please?" If you've been in this position, how did you recover?
Keep things in perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
If there is a company that won't look at you because you have a 3.9 GPA instead of a 4.0, you probably don't want to work there anyway. Far more important are the projects and activities you do outside of class. I know I would rather hire someone with a 3.0 GPA and open source development on their resume, than a 4.0 student who hasn't done anything outside of class.
Now, I'm not saying that you should blow off exams, but it is just a test. You will have many more of them in your future. If you blow this one, you can try a bit harder on the next one.
Panic Attacks Suck (Score:5, Interesting)
I did a bunch of research online to learn about Panic Attacks. I asked my doctor about them. My doctor offered medication which I declined. In the end I just suffered through so many panic attacks that after a while a panic attack became somewhat anti-climatic. Almost routine. At that point they dissapearred almost overnight.
Your experiences may vary of course. Good luck to you.
whj
P.S. Worse thing though is don't be ashamed or embarrased. That'll make it all worse.
Pressure is a bitch (Score:5, Interesting)
The most general is to talk with a psychologist about your experience. It's not a panacea, but you may gain some insight into what led into the attack, and how to cope with the situation if (when) it occurs again.
Next up - make sure you're taking time to relax in your daily routine. It's easy to fall into a pattern of overwork that becomes counterproductive, especially when the situations get grim, like exam time tends to be. Even a simple thing like taking a daily hour long walk can go a long way toward relieving any stress you're feeling.
Also, if you aren't already following a good nutrition plan with attendant exercise, consider starting. Feeling good physically is the first step to feeling good mentally.
See your physician. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Get wasted and quit working (Score:1, Interesting)
This is exactly why exam anxiety sets in. A person taking an exam can only think about the result of the exam during the exam. Panic attacks happen when you are 30 minutes into a 2 hour physics test and you think "I'm failing this test and now I'm going to lose my financial aid." Well maybe not physics tests since *everyone* thinks they've failed each and every test (average scores of 45% tend to give you that feeling).
My recommendations:
- Take a couple of physics courses. They almost always grade on the curve and the average scores are typically around 40-60%. This will desensitize a person about the correlation of problems answered correctly and the final corrected exam score.
- Do not even consider of thinking about the reprocussions of the exam during the exam. This takes discipline and practice.
- Answer only one question at a time and focus on only one question at a time. Heck, if you think about it you are only failing one question at a time.
- Drill. The more practice you have doing run-throughs of the exam the better you will fare. Just as firefighters and soldiers drill to make sure they don't freeze up during stress, a timed practice exam will help you.
Rest, fun and relaxation usually did the trick for me. I have a long history of acing big exams, and I generally lowered my effort and workload in order to pull it off.You previously admitted that you never "got deep into the exam fear thing." Why are you now trying to give advice on what has worked for you?
I've experienced similar things. (Score:2, Interesting)
This isn't something you can just "turn off" by trying really hard. Some people have suggested you see a physician. That may not be a bad idea. There are several physical things that can cause this and a doctor can help examine those.
What I found worked best for me was trying to keep a sense of perspective. It felt like everything in my future was riding on how I did in school. Anyway, what worked best for me was keeping a healthy sense of perspective (life goes on even if you have panic attacks about exams) and to make sure I had at least an hour each day I could spend doing something non-school related (reading a book I wanted to read, star-gazing, playing Half-life, etc...) These times helped me to disengage my brain for a bit so I was no longer trying to do but was instead just trying to be.
Best of luck to you. I applaud your openess in bringing your question to this caustic and cynical crowd.
I KInda Disagree (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Cut out on sugary drinks completely. They're empty carbs that make you jittery during the day and mess up your teeth. The jury's still out on caffiene I like it, but don't OD on the stuff. It's just as hard to focus through caffiene jitters as it is through soft drink jitters.
2) Going to sleep early: Good. Taking drugs to get to sleep early: Bad. I've noticed that if I take something like nyquil I have a much harder time getting up the next morning, no matter what time I go to bed. Unless the exam's at 6am, I wouldn't suggest going to bed any earlier than 9pm, but I wouldn't suggest pushing it much later either.
3) Orange juice good. It's a full day's supply of vitamin C. High protien breakfast also good. While some people prefer steak and eggs, I like steak and steak. Or oatmeal.
4) Exercise also good. A little exercise in the morning always seems to wake me up. If you're on a cool campus you can go straight from your steak and steak breakfast to the gym for a quick round of kick boxing, then you'll be set to face whatever challenges the day brings!
Re:Emotional Detachment (Score:5, Interesting)
Once your at the exam, even the night before, there's nothing you can do that is going to increase your knowledge, so, stop caring. If you fail, you fail, try it again next year or pick a different educational path, if you pass, good job. Sweating over it is just going to reduce your performance, so just answer the questions as far as you can and don't worry about it.
If you don't know the answer, well, move to the next question, don't panic "I don't know this!". If you get to the end of the paper and you have questions unanswered, go back to them and just casually think about it, perhaps you did know after all, but don't panic about it, it's too late for that.
I was the same after exams too, everybody of course asks "how do you think you did". My reply was always "I don't know, and I don't really care", if I passed I passed, if I failed (and I did once, I hated that course), so be it, nothing I could do after the exam would change that.
Re:Emotional Detachment (Score:5, Interesting)
BINGO
School doesn't matter. Passing and the degree are all that really count.
Marketable skills and real world experiance matter most.
Get a girlfriend (or boyfriend depending on your preferance), drink some beers, wine or whatever you like and enjoy college, this is your LAST chance. The real world is a lot tougher and a lot less fun until you become a billionare or die
Re:Emotional Detachment (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a finite amount of knowledge which you can assimilate preparing for the exam. After that you should stop caring for at least a while and leave it to settle. Best of all get shitfaced the second-to-last evening before the exam and sleep over the last day. It is quite easy in most of European Unis where you have around a month long examination session. Essentially you have to get through the stages of care, fear, shitfaced, not care. Once you are at the last stage you perform the best.
This is impossible in most of the US though. Their short examination sessions do not allow this.
Re:Keep things in perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
If there is a company that won't look at you because you have a 3.9 GPA instead of a 4.0, you probably don't want to work there anyway. Far more important are the projects and activities you do outside of class. I know I would rather hire someone with a 3.0 GPA and open source development on their resume, than a 4.0 student who hasn't done anything outside of class.
Bingo. To begin with, life is probabilistic. I'm not talking quantum strangeness or physical uncertainty or anything like that, just that there's no one path to get to where you're going. And where you're going often changes while you're en route, for better or worse, due to circumstances outside of your control.
I slacked in high school but I did very good on the PSATs. So I ended up going to a smaller liberal arts school to pursue my computer science degree, rather than some of the top gun schools I applied to (some of which I got into, but offered me no funding). When I got there, partially because the school's CS program sucked, I ended up in mathematics, which I really love. Because the school was small, I took a semester abroad at a larger school as part of a special math program designed specifically for this purpose, and I got introduced to what has been my favorite part of mathematics so far. There, I networked with an awesome professor who is now funding my first year of grad school.
Had I made the cut initially and attended Carnegie Mellon or MIT, I might still be in computer science, and I would've certainly not spent this semester abroad. I would not have made this contact. I'd be heading down a different path which might be just as good or even better. Or it might be worse. The point is that you put in a reasonable effort to tip the odds in your favor and then take what life throws at you. What helps a lot for me is treating things like tests (not just school tests, but every test in life) as a game or challenge. You're already in the situation and you've prepared as well as you're going to prepare, now it's just up to you to do as well as you can and let the chips fall where they may.
Re:I KInda Disagree (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Emotional Detachment (Score:4, Interesting)
After you've prepared the subject, you need to prepare yourself.
I believe some studies have shown that listening to certain types of music (e.g. Mozart) before exams actually results in a boost in results. You need to relax and prime your brain into its high-performance mode where it can regurgitate all the knowledge you've been cramming into it for the last few weeks.
Daniel
Re:Emotional Detachment (Score:4, Interesting)
Or a subject like programming, where I already knew some of just about every Algol-like language, so a first or even second semester of Java took maybe a couple of minutes of preparation. That is, I'd sit down in the room, and before the prof tells everyone to shut up and starts passing out the tests, I ask the person next to me things like "What's the Java syntax for a constructor?" And I'd pass.
Don't count on that, though. I was lucky to be so far ahead of the class in my independent study. This CS class had three teachers, one of which was much faster-paced than the other two. The first semester, I got a woman who really can't teach and was incredibly slow-paced, the lab stuff was insanely easy, but the test was much harder. The second semester was just the opposite, though I don't really know what the finals were like, I was gone before then.
Which brings us back to the main point -- I'm not doing great, but I'm a college dropout (first semester) and within a couple of weeks of coming home, I had one part-time job and a couple of bits of contract work.
I don't have any ambitions about money, I only want to make enough to live and occasionally afford toys like a new video card. If my pay per hour goes up, I'll work less and play more. So, obviously this doesn't apply to everyone, but I don't have many regrets about dropping out.
Re:Emotional Detachment (Score:2, Interesting)
An exam is an exam, you test your knowledge on a piece of paper. If your knowledge isn't good enough and you fail, the logical course of action is to identify your weak points and fix them, then try again. That's how real life usually goes.. you screw up, you learn from your mistakes, then you do better the next time around. Unfortunately in the horrible institution we call education, this means another 3 to 6 months of sitting in a boring class watching paint dry. If you could do your "final" exam, get the results then have a few weeks to patch up and retake a slightly different exam, I think it would produce a greater portion of bright minds. The pressure on cramming is the greatest destructor of minds, because if you spent 8 hours squeezing that textbook into your skull, a month later you will remember less than 10% of that cram session. It's good to have knowledge checks here and there to keep everyone on the same page, but it's really just an indicator of how quickly you can memorize superficial content. You may understand basic calculus after 2 weeks of classes, but after 3 years of related education in aerospace engineering you will know calculus inside out, your brain will be one with the math. To me, that's when you should be graded on your skills, because that number will be far more significant in showing how good of an engineer you are.
There are tons of things that magically came together in my mind, years after any sort of formal education.. life experiences, personal discoveries as a hobbyist inventor, sometimes just sitting on the crapper alone with my thoughts.. your mind is constantly connecting the dots as your life knowledge fleshes out over time. There are things I know about topics I've never formally studied, concepts in physics, chemistry, biology that exist solely in my mind as ethereal links; things I don't know how to express, but I know them inside-out. Education is just a means of trying to convey that non-verbal information, the idea is to present a model of a concept using language, imagery and experimentation, and hope that your own mind will assemble the true knowledge. It's like showing you a picture of a plane, telling you it has to fly, and expecting you to build a working plane on your own; amazingly the mind can do this on its own in many cases. The picture is not knowledge, the picture is only one dimension of that wisdom.. the more dimensions you assemble, the closer you get to seeing the big picture.
How to regain focus (Score:2, Interesting)
When your mind just goes blank, think of some really lame pop song and after a verse of that your brain snaps back into focus.
The downside could be that you have an annoying song playing in your head for a few hours! But hey if you pass the exam it is worth it (just about!).