Breathing Exercises for Test Anxiety

Here’s an uncomfortable fact about test anxiety: you can’t talk yourself out of it. As one of our tutors put it after his own mid-GMAT meltdown, our nervous systems evolved to keep us from being mauled by jungle cats, and a system that powerful doesn’t stand down just because you told it to relax.

Don’t despair, though: breathing can reach our nervous systems, and luckily, it’s something we all know how to do (we hope!). Slow, deliberate breathing is the one thing that actually works in the middle of an exam – it requires no equipment, and it’s delightfully discreet. Here are four breathing exercises we’ve pulled together from our performance coaches and from tutors who’ve used them on their own official exams, compiled so that you can use them on test day too.

The 4-4-8 Reset: For Mid-Exam Spirals

This one comes from our veteran tutor Dave Goldstein. It’s easy to remember, and it’s the one you can use for when things start to go sideways mid-exam.

If you find anxiety is starting to bubble up in the midst of writing your exam, push yourself back from the computer for a moment. Inhale for a count of 4, hold for a count of 4, exhale for a count of 8. Two full cycles, then back to the test.

That’s the exact sequence Dave used to pull out of an anxiety death-spiral during his own GMAT retake, after wasting several minutes re-reading the same RC passage four times. He walked out with a fantastic score despite the meltdown.

The physical push-back from the desk is an important part of this routine, by the way. Breaking the spiral means interrupting your body’s position, not just your breath.

The Three-Breath Protocol: For the Moment You Notice Panic

Our mental performance coach, Jen Schumacher, teaches a slightly different approach for the moment you notice panic showing up:

Stop what you’re doing. Acknowledge the physical sensations you’re feeling. Remind yourself that you feel this way because you care. Then take three slow, diaphragmatic breaths before you proceed.

Anxiety escalates when you treat a pounding heart as an emergency. It de-escalates when you meet it with understanding instead of panic. In Jen’s words, the time you spend doing this “will pay you back in dividends of more accurate responses on the test.”

The Pre-Test Routine: Three Breaths Before You Begin

Breathing also belongs before the exam as part of a pre-performance routine. Jen has one she used before swimming the English Channel and uses before every speaking engagement: remind yourself of the preparation you’ve done, take three deep breaths, and visualize yourself executing well.

Build your own version, and then actually run it before every practice test, not just the real exam. A routine only works under pressure if it’s automatic, and it becomes automatic through, well, repetition! Pair it with our test-day visualization audio to make practice conditions feel like the real thing.

Daily Breath Training: Mindfulness as an Off-Day Exercise

The three exercises above are in-the-moment tools. This last one builds the underlying capacity. Mindfulness meditation, which at the beginner level is mostly just paying attention to your breath, trains you to notice when your mind starts wandering or spiraling and pull it back. A study on GRE® test-takers found score improvements after just two weeks of daily practice, because it reduced mind-wandering during the test.

Ten minutes a day with a guided app is plenty to start. For more on that, check out our 16-day starter program for meditation.