Beginner’s Guide to Test Anxiety

Test anxiety is a combination of physical symptoms and emotional reactions — think racing heart, foggy thinking, nausea, tunnel vision — that interfere with your ability to perform on exams like the GMAT, GRE®, or EA. Below, we cover what causes it, how to tell whether it’s hurting your score, and five strategies that work.

I’ll be honest: when I tutor a student who has severe test anxiety, I know that we’re likely to face a difficult journey to success on the GMAT, GRE®, or EA. It’s certainly not impossible to overcome test anxiety, but when an anxious student ultimately does well on the test, we celebrate with extra enthusiasm.

One of my favorite students was so anxious that he broke out in hives during his initial GMAT exam and couldn’t read the questions on the screen. When he finally earned a great score after quite a few months of hard work, it felt like a huge, hard-won victory.

It’s remarkably common to experience some nerves leading up to an exam. Who doesn’t feel butterflies in their stomach when the first question pops up on the screen? The line between helpful exam-day excitement and debilitating test anxiety is not black and white, and almost everyone feels some test-taking anxiety before an event like a standardized exam. Even GMAT tutors get nervous, sometimes REALLY nervous, on test day.

So if you feel anxious about the GMAT or another standardized test, you’re not alone.

Read below to find out:

• What is test anxiety?
• How do you know whether test anxiety is negatively impacting your performance?
• If you have test anxiety, what can you do about it?

What Is Test Anxiety?

You’re about to start your exam. You might notice that you have:

• Sweaty palms
• Shaky hands
• A pounding heart
• Shortness of breath
• Nausea
• A sensation of paralysis
• Tension in your body
• Tunnel vision
• An inability to think clearly, even if you don’t feel consciously nervous in other ways
• Perhaps even nightmares, like one of our students had.

These are common, normal reactions to short-term stress.

Imagine that instead of taking the GMAT or GRE®, you’re faced with an angry tiger that’s trying to eat you. You would want your heart to pound, so that it can pump oxygenated blood to your limbs and help you run away or fight. Your attention might narrow into tunnel vision, zeroing in on the threat in front of you.

These symptoms may be helpful in certain situations, but can be very unhelpful when you’re sitting down to take a test. For a cognitive task like the GMAT or GRE®, you want to be alert and attentive, but you also want to be relaxed, creative, and confident.

Test anxiety occurs when you are overly amped-up for the situation at hand, and the mental and physical reactions to the situation impede your ability to perform at your best. This video explains what happens in your body when you experience test anxiety.

UNC-Chapel Hill’s Learning Center puts it this way: “test anxiety is a combination of physical symptoms and emotional reactions that interfere with your ability to perform well on tests.”

So, the question is not whether you feel nervous about the test. The question is whether your nerves are causing you to underperform on test day. (And to be clear, exam anxiety is the same beast whatever you call it: test-taking anxiety, test-day nerves, or plain old freaking out.)

How to Know Whether You Have Test Anxiety

For many people, the answer to this question is pretty self-evident: if you feel the symptoms of anxiety listed above and know they’re hurting your test score, you can skip right down to the strategies below. Other test-takers score far lower on their actual exam than on their practice exams, and that’s often a sign that you’re experiencing test anxiety, even if you don’t consciously feel nervous during the exam.

How to Deal With Test Anxiety: Five Strategies

So… what can you actually DO about test anxiety? You have quite a few options, and the best test anxiety strategies for you will inevitably depend on the specifics of your situation. Read below for some options to mitigate the negative impacts of test anxiety.

1) Reduce Test Anxiety by Being Prepared

We’ve all witnessed (or lived through) an exchange like the following:

Student 1: “I’m so nervous about the test, I’m going to fail!”

Student 2: “Did you study?”

Student 1: “… well, no…”

Student 2: summons willpower to be sympathetic and not judgmental

It should go without saying that if you don’t prepare for a specific test, you’re going to feel unprepared for it.

So, one way to diminish test anxiety is to ensure that you’re well prepared for the exam. If, for example, you’re taking the GMAT, you should be familiar with the format and content of the exam before setting foot in the test center, and you should have several GMAT practice tests under your belt.

Unfortunately, many of our GMAT, GRE®, EA, and LSAT® tutoring students DO put in plenty of work, but still feel anxiety when they take their exam. So, while preparing for the test is one piece of the puzzle, it may not be enough on its own to feel calm and confident as you take a standardized exam.

2) Mindfulness and Mental Performance Techniques

One tool with real evidence behind it for easing test anxiety is mindfulness meditation. When you meditate, you train your brain to let go of certain thoughts and instead to focus on something neutral and consistent, such as your breath.

This is a valuable skill if you find yourself distracted by anxious thoughts during the GMAT or similar exams. Through daily practice, you can learn to turn your attention away from these distracting thoughts and back to answering the question on the screen in front of you.

Beyond meditation, there is a whole host of mental skills that professionals use to perform their best in high-pressure situations. Many professional athletes develop pre-game rituals that help them remain calm and focused as they prepare for important competitions. Or, when something doesn’t go well, they use a different ritual to let go of past mistakes and refocus on the present moment. You can develop your own rituals for before and during your exam.

Another mental skill is to reframe the symptoms of anxiety in a positive light. Instead of freaking out when you feel your heart pounding, you can learn to interpret this symptom as a good thing: you’re about to crush the exam, so of course your body is amped up!

For a complete guide to these techniques, including the research behind mindfulness, how to build pre-performance routines, and a test-day visualization audio you can use before every practice test, see our guide to mindfulness and mental performance for test-takers. You can also watch this video for a quick introduction to mindfulness meditation, or this one on overcoming performance anxiety from our mental performance coach.

3) Lifestyle Changes to Reduce Test Anxiety

Changes to your daily routine could help you enter the test room in a more relaxed and healthy frame of mind. Three physical factors — exercise, nutrition, and sleep — can all affect your cognitive performance and anxiety levels.

EXERCISE: Some symptoms of anxiety, a racing heart and excessive sweating, for example, occur when your body is too amped up for the task at hand. One way to reduce these symptoms is to get regular exercise. Choose an activity that fits in with your schedule, and make it a goal to elevate your heart rate most days, even for just a short period of time.

DIET: What you eat can also play a role in managing your energy levels, which can, in turn, help with the symptoms of anxiety. Do your dietary habits leave you satiated and energized? Do you rely on caffeine in a way that leads to jitters and crashes? If necessary, make changes to your diet to ensure a consistent level of energy throughout the day.

SLEEP: Adequate sleep is also imperative for feeling relaxed, focused, and refreshed on test day. Inadequate or poor-quality sleep leaves your body and mind feeling stressed out, and you’ll have less capacity to regulate your test anxiety symptoms if you’re chronically behind on sleep, even if you’re used to powering through your day after just a few hours of sleep.

For detailed guidance on all three factors, including expert advice from our fitness, nutrition, and sleep consultants, see our guide to health and test performance. (And if you’re tempted by pharmaceutical shortcuts, read why academic PEDs won’t help your test score first.)

4) Seek Expert Advice to Address Your Test Anxiety

It can be hard to see your own blind spots and address test anxiety on your own, and you may want to seek help from professionals who can help you develop strategies to conquer your anxiety.

A performance coach won’t tell you to “care less” about your score, because that would only diminish the commitment you have to your goals. Instead, a good coach helps you reinterpret the pressure you put on yourself and develop strategies to manage your experience of it: breathing techniques, relaxation routines, and “reset” protocols you can use mid-exam when you feel the spiral start.

Here are some signs that you’d benefit from working with a performance coach:

• You perform better without pressure (your practice test scores are consistently higher than your real scores)
• You experience significant anxiety or stress before a test
• You struggle to get started, constantly putting off studying until you’re forced to cram
• You feel overwhelmed when you sit down to study and have a hard time staying focused
• You constantly worry about the future, your score, or what others might think
• You study hard but have low confidence in yourself
• You beat yourself up over mistakes and carry them into subsequent questions

Meet our performance experts to see whether they can help you tackle your anxiety on tests like the GMAT, GRE®, EA, and LSAT®. For more, watch this video on overcoming performance anxiety featuring performance psychologist Jen Schumacher, or read our full article on mental performance coaching.

5) Consider a Relaxed Approach to the Test

We know this is easier said than done. If you’d like proof it can be done, read about Mr. FP, whose relaxed approach to the GMAT paid off in a big way on test day. His story might shift how you think about the test.

Math Anxiety and Test Performance

Some of us don’t dread the whole exam; we dread the math. If the quant section disproportionately contributes to your anxiety, you might be dealing with a specific version of everything described above.

Math anxiety has the same physical symptoms, the same fight-or-flight misfiring, but it’s triggered by quant content in particular. The good news is that it responds to the same strategies, and the math you’re afraid of is mostly not the math you’ll face. Our full guide to math anxiety breaks down what’s actually on the quant section, how to retrain the panic response when it hits mid-section, and why the “I’m not a math person” narrative hurts, rather than helps.

GMAT Test Anxiety: Why This Exam Rattles Even Strong Test-Takers

A quick word for the MBA crowd, because GMAT anxiety has a flavor of its own. The GMAT is an adaptive exam, so you have to answer every question to move on, though you can bookmark questions and revisit them at the end of the section; you can review and change up to three answers per section, but only if you’ve banked the time. Each section runs on its own unforgiving 45-minute clock. That combination, no escape hatch plus a ticking timer, is exactly the environment where anxious minds spiral.

The tricky part is that GMAT test anxiety doesn’t always feel like “anxiety.” The most common sign is simply a massive gap between your practice test scores and your real scores. But there are subtler versions too: sleepless nights before test day, careless errors you wouldn’t normally make, sudden spirals of doubt mid-section, stubbornly spending far too much time on a small number of questions, or finding that reading passages suddenly make no sense on test day even though they’re fine in practice. If any of that sounds familiar, your problem might not be content knowledge at all.

The good news: every strategy in this guide applies directly to the GMAT, and we have proof it works. Three of our own tutors have written honestly about their struggles with GMAT test anxiety: Dana’s retake story, Dave’s mid-exam meltdown, and Mike’s zero-point plateau, and all three walked out the other side with scores they were proud of.