After Pongal, the shivers of cold winter recede, giving place to shivers of examination. For many students, examinations are the origin of desperate stress and can drastically reduce the efficiency of performance.

There are five phases of ‘pressures’. Before three months it starts as uneasiness. It turns into anxiety during the week preceding exams. It emerges as trepidation one-day prior to the dooms day. It peaks to tension while taking the question paper, continues as nervousness during the test and stays for sometime even after the exam.

Dwelling on mistakes and insecurity are the main signals of uneasiness. It starts with self-criticism and ends with ‘What if’ thinking.  When you wake up one morning, it unwillingly reminds you about your exam. You experience an unpleasant agony without any cause. Symptoms of second stage are: trouble sleeping, fearing the worst, depression. Trepidation includes sweaty palms and shivering fingers. Rapid heartbeats, loosing self-confidence are the signs of tension. Loosing memory, lapses in the thinking process while writing the examination are the indicators of nervousness.

Anxiety is healthy sign to certain extent, as you would be reckless if you did not feel anxious about your exams. But avoid unwarranted phobias. Under the influence of examination phobia, you find yourself withdrawing with low self-esteem. Then how to deal with it?

1. Stop Avoiding Imaginary Issues:  Fifty percent of the problems are imaginary. Thirty percent don’t harm us. Remaining twenty percent can be tackled if we stop thinking about the previous eighty percent.

2. Learn To Handle Anxiety Effectively: Learn to handle anxiety more effectively with a relaxation method that suits you. This includes breathing exercises; yogasanas (particularly savasana), self-hypnotism and even a pleasant morning walk also.

3. Strengthen Your Revision Skills: Explore the critical nature of your thinking. Dispute your negative beliefs about yourself. You have got this far; why should you fail now? 

4. Combat The Avoidance: Look at old papers. Design your own questions. Make yourself, rehearse with other people and your tutors.

5. Identify Your Worries: To seek an appropriate treatment, identify what sort of worry you have. Take a measure of how you react in different situations and review the ingredients, which are particularly worrying. For example, making your tutor aware of the problem you have; rehearsing public speaking in private; taping your voice; getting as relaxed as possible on the day etc may help you. Panic, for example, will not respond to techniques and strategies aimed at reducing and dealing with general worry.

6. ‘No’ Postponements: Break the habit of postponing. Procrastination in Latin means ‘until tomorrow’. Acquire the skill to start the work ‘without ceremony’. It is one of the main skills of time management. Start something pleasant and slowly shift to more complicated one.

7. Visualize: Visualize what you could achieve. Imagine having all your work done before the deadlines. Imagine six hours work a day then going out without a guilty conscience; imagine getting good (may not be top) grades without having to panic and sit up all night.

8. Analyze: Locate and work out on a particular thing that stops you working. The quicker you find a way to get going on things, the quicker you will finish them.

There is no simple single solution to such thing as ‘exam fear’. You may create more anxiety if you become too concerned to relieve all the symptoms at one stretch. Do not consider ‘immediate and complete’ relief as the only solution.

Self discipline is the ability to shape for better approach towards life and it includes aptitude to accept the challenges, time and space management, emotional balance and administration. Decide what ultimately you want, lay the path by removing the magnetic (but unproductive) hurdles. There are only two options, pain of discipline or hurt of disappointment. As I always mention in my articles, the five pillars of Self-discipline are: Self-actualisation, Hard work, Acceptance, Perseverance and Entertainment (SHAPE).

Self-actualisation: Shape your future. Set small goals. Never try to push too hard. Once you succeed, enlarge the targets. Comparing your abilities with others leads to disappointment and failure. Accept your capacities otherwise called. Suppose you feel that you are a poor decision maker. Are you weak in taking even simple decisions? Do you take a decision but poor in implementing it? Analyse first on your weakness, before working on it. It is called 5-P formula: Perusing, Planning, Preparing, Proceeding and Perfecting.  Your real capacity is more than what you think. Suppose you feel that you cannot hold concentration for more than an hour while reading, sandwich an uninteresting subject between two interesting ones and on the first day, keep the target at 65 minutes. Watch out.

Hard work: What is hard work? It is of two types, one is beyond your capacity; and the other is against your liking. Climbing Mount Everest may be beyond your ability but waking up in the early morning to study is certainly not beyond your capacity. Take reward for your work. Suppose chemistry is your nightmare. Select fifty questions. Challenge your parents that if you could answer any question from them, they should purchase a ticket for you and your friend to watch a one-day international match.  Thus you can cross your mental barriers.

Acceptance: Once accepting to perform a task (like study/sports), feel that nobody imposed ‘it’ on you. Hanging on to the things till the last moment, is the main problem for students. In fact every one of us tries to postpone unpalatable tasks. Your achievements give you more strength. The satisfaction leads to perseverance that is the ability to be firm on working, irrespective of your fondness towards the said job. Take time to deliberate, but when the time for action has arrived, stop thinking and go with it. Then your life turns to be an excellent entertainer.
 “Fear is a dark room where the negatives develop’ said one Pakistani philosopher. Fear is the mixture of doubt, apprehension and complex. Doubt is like virus and when we allow it to grow bigger than our faith, it kills our success. Apprehension is the compass that shows the areas where we have to grow. Complex is like a mist. Walk through it and you would find nothing.

Many students identify ‘lack of communication’ as one of their main weaknesses. There are three main tips. First, it is your authority over the subject, secondly your language and finally but mainly, your confidence. Nobody would have the self-assurance in the initial stages. Believe that the others also started like you only. Initiate with simple language. Proceed. Then you will be surprised to find your in-built ability to articulate your expressions freely and assertively. Let others simile at your grammatical mistakes and stammering for correct words in the beginning stages. Alvin Toffler, writer of the book ‘Future Shock’ says, “Even if you do learn to speak excellent and correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?”

The four pillars to fight fear are: Wakefulness, Hard Work, Innovation, and Persistence (WHIP). It is a convenient way to remember them, since success is associated with whipping the fear. Write down your fears. Top the list with the fear that causes you the most anxiety and embarrassment and go down in order of priority. Now start with the bottom.  It is easy to combat the small qualms and gain confidence, to fight more harmful phobias. Easy to say but difficult to practice, I know. But it’s not impossible.
How you take care of your vehicle? You cover it carefully from the dust. You never pollute its fuel with water. You drive carefully on a bumpy road. When your vehicle gets a small dent you feel very sad.

I will pay you a million. Will you sell yourself to me? No. Your intrinsic value is more than your vehicle. You can buy a new vehicle if one is spoiled. But nothing can replace you. Recognise your worth. Keep your mind away from dust. Never entertain polluted thoughts. Don’t walk on bumpy roads. Let your career not spoil with dents. You are capable of achieving anything. If you doubt your beliefs, you believe your doubts. If you fail to practice, you practice failure.