How Mindfulness Coaching Can Help With Test Anxiety

Co-authored With Jenny Forman:

Jenny Forman, PhD, is a clinical psychologist with over 15 years of experience in practicing and teaching mindfulness meditation. As a mindfulness coach, she helps her clients transform their relationship with anxiety and stress, allowing them to perform their best when faced with inevitable challenges. Read more about Jenny here!

If you’re studying for a standardized exam and dealing with resistance to studying, obsessive thinking, anxiety, self-doubt, or any other challenging emotions related to your test, mindfulness meditation may help. According to clinical psychologist and mindfulness coach Jenny Forman, PhD, it can also help you develop greater ability to sustain focus and ease, which in turn helps with processing and remembering information.

We asked Jenny to explain what mindfulness actually is, how it helps with test anxiety, and what working with a mindfulness coach looks like.

What Mindfulness Actually Is

Jenny defines mindfulness as a nonjudgmental awareness of your moment-by-moment thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations, followed by an appropriate response that is of service to yourself, others, and the environment. It is not about emptying your mind or achieving some blissed-out state. It is about noticing what is happening without getting consumed by it, and responding deliberately.

How Mindfulness Helps on Test Day

By practicing mindfulness techniques and meditation before your test day, you gain strategies for staying in the present moment and feeling centered, even when you’re nervous or anxious. The practice doesn’t eliminate anxiety. It changes your relationship with it so that anxious thoughts have less power over your performance.

When Thoughts Spin Out of Control

A common concern from test-takers: “My thoughts spin out of control during the exam. Is that something I can actually fix?”

Jenny’s answer: you can’t always control your negative thought patterns, but mindfulness provides a space in which you’re able to observe your thoughts without being consumed by them. In that spaciousness, you can investigate what’s driving the “out of control” thinking and respond to yourself in a nonjudgmental, kind way. The result is a transformed relationship to obsessive thinking, not the elimination of it.

Fitting Mindfulness Into a Busy Schedule

If you’re already spending a lot of hours on test prep homework, the idea of adding meditation to your routine might sound like more stress, not less. Jenny notes that mindfulness practice can be done in many moments throughout the day, rather than only through a formal meditation session. That said, it does take practice, and the more you practice, the greater the benefits.

If you want a structured starting point, check out our 16-day mindfulness starter program for test-takers.

Working With a Mindfulness Coach

A mindfulness coach helps you learn techniques to develop greater capacity to be in the present moment. You might have specific challenges you want to work on, like test anxiety or obsessive thinking, or you might just want to develop greater self-awareness and ability to be fully present.

Jenny finds that people who are interested in turning their awareness inward and who maintain a curious, open attitude tend to benefit the most. Motivation to practice the strategies between sessions also matters, as it does with any skill.

Jenny also brings a background in special education and learning differences, which helps her appreciate that everyone has different strengths and weaknesses within their learning profiles. She tailors mindfulness teachings and strategies to each student’s particular needs, and if other resources are needed at any point, she communicates that openly.

One important boundary Jenny is clear about: although she is a psychologist and therapist, students must understand that in this role she is acting as a mindfulness coach and is not providing clinical treatment.

For more information on Jenny’s mindfulness practice, visit her website here.