Test Anxiety

Listen as Katherine Zimmerman covers Test Anxiety and what can be done to alleviate it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Indeed. All right. Well, today I thought we would talk a little bit about test anxiety, because it is that time of year, isn't it? People finishing up school, classes are finishing, their exams coming up. In fact, let's start there. Now, anybody who's raised kids and at some point they turn into teenagers will relate to this story. It's nine o'clock at night. My daughter comes in. She is, I don't know, junior in high school, maybe a sophomore, and she threw herself into the big recliner in the living room and said to me, Well, she didn't say it, she ordered me to hypnotize her. Now I'm thinking, nine o'clock, I'm thinking about going to bed. But she hardly ever asked me for anything, and she's truly embarrassed that I'm a hypnotherapist. Truly embarrassed. Drag her friends away from me. They won't, they were interested and curious, and she'd say, get away from my mom. So it's a moment where maybe we can connect. So I said, sure. Uh, what are we working on? She said, Well, I I need help with the geometry midterm. It's um, she said, I can do the homework and I understand it, but when I take a test in geometry, then she said, I'm getting D's. Okay, now for all of you who've raised teenagers, go ahead, you tell me when was this midterm?

SPEAKER_04 1:31

Tomorrow. The next day.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

There we go. Exactly. So I did. I hypnotized her, she's a really good subject, highly suggestible, and gave her some suggestions, and I don't know, it's been a long time. Uh, brought her out of hypnosis, and and I was hoping to hear, gosh, mom, that was so helpful. Thank you. What I heard was your voice isn't relaxing, and don't use that long induction again. And off she went. You got you just have to keep laughing. That's the most important part of being a teenage mom is to laugh about what they do and say, so come to find out she got a B on the midterm. Fast forward, it's nine o'clock at night. Here she comes, back in the recliner. The final is coming up. And when's the final, ladies? Tomorrow. There we go. Yeah. Same thing. We went through it again. She had a few more complaints. I never got a thank you. She did get a B instead of the D's that she was getting. So clearly it worked. And I know I know enough about test anxiety, having helped other people with it. I've helped a lot of people. When I was in Sacramento, there are three law schools in the area. So I had a lot of clients who wanted to pass the bar exam. And they would wait. This this part always puzzled me a bit. They would wait until they had failed it three, maybe four times. And it's expensive to take, and there's a lot of studying going on. But then they would come and do hypnosis. And I learned from one of the one of the bar students how to help her. So I developed a whole program and people started passing the bar that we're using hypnosis for it. But just to talk a little bit about what happens to the to us when we're in that sit in that state, first you study and you know the material, right? And there's no pressure. And then you go into the exam setting. And immediately there's that concern about what if? What if I don't remember? You see a question and don't immediately have the answer, and you think, oh no, all is lost, and you start catastrophizing, and then you tense up, and what happens when you tense up? All that information you've studied gets locked in place. It's not accessible. It's there, you can't get it. How often have you walked out of an exam and said, Oh, wait, wait, let me have that paper back. Now I know the answer. Right? Because the pressure's off. I think when I took hypnotherapy training, there were 13 of us in that class. I was the only one who used self-hypnosis to prepare to take that written exam. The only one. I walked into the class that day and everybody's I thought, and I said to them, Really? Really? We're learning to be hypnotherapists? So you're telling me you didn't use self-hypnosis to prepare for this test today? Not one of them. Which I found to be so surprising. We're gonna be doing this for a living, really.

SPEAKER_00 4:53

So that still holds true today. Most hypnotherapists don't seek the help that we give. Which is a shame, isn't it? We give it away to everybody else, and we're the last ones to give it to ourselves.

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Yeah. Well, I think what was my advantage was that I had learned self-hypnosis probably a good eight years before I took training to be a hypnotherapist. And so I was already in the habit of using self-hypnosis for a whole variety of things. I didn't use it every day back then. I used it when I was in a crisis mode. Then I would pull it out. And once I became a hypnotherapist, then I realized I needed to use self-hypnosis on a daily basis. Or otherwise, how do I ask my clients to do that if I'm not doing it? But you're right. I do see a lot of hypnotherapists, our colleagues that do not make good use of that, and what a shame. Because it really is helpful. So I think most people understand ordinary nervousness before a test, and a little bit of alertness can actually be useful. Sharpens our attention, it increases our focus, reminds us that the outcome matters. But test anxiety, that one's different. That happens when the mind and the body respond to an exam as though it's a threat. It seems like it's a be-all and end-all. And like I said, even if they know the material and they've studied and they feel prepared, once the test begins, their minds go blank, the stomach tightens, the heart races, handshake, and that inner dialogue, oh, that runs rampant, doesn't it? So instead of accessing what they know, they're fighting their own nervous system. And that's where hypnosis can be so helpful. Because hypnosis gives us a way to work with the subconscious mind, calm the body, change the internal response to testing, and create a new mental pathway for confidence, recall, and focus. So test anxiety really isn't just being nervous, it's a learned response. Well, if we learn something, we can unlearn it. We can learn something that's more effective. So somewhere along the way, the mind connected testing with pressure, fear, embarrassment, disappointment, failure, or loss of control. Ooh, I never I never have liked that piece. A little bit of a need for control. A little bit. A little bit. So for one person, it might have started as a bad experience in school. And I know I had a I had one of my clients that needed, I think it was might not have been the bar, it might have been a professional exam, but her past experience that we went to, she was in grade school, and not her family, not her, not the adults in her life that really mattered, but the mother of her friend. Megan neg made a negative remark to her about her not being as smart as her daughter. And she took it on as her truth. You know, she's seven or eight years old. That must be true for me. When my daughter was young, I remember I said to her, because I hadn't really liked math growing up, and when she was struggling with math, I said to her one day, not knowing any better, oh, you're having trouble with math. You know, I had struggled with math too. So she could have identified with that and taken it on. And when the truth is they might be struggling with this piece of math, this little part of geometry for my daughter, and not math in general. But if they globalize it, then suddenly math is a problem across the board. So sometimes it can be connected to a specific memory. It could be criticism from a teacher. Sometimes it's a look on someone's face that we decide means something that it doesn't really mean, right? Have you ever watched somebody and thought, oh, I know what they're thinking? No, you don't. No, you don't. But if you think you do and you make a decision about yourself based on what you think is going on with them, that can stay with us. Especially if we're in a place in life right then when we're a little more vulnerable than usual. Yeah. I was in front of a group one time speaking, and I hadn't spoken at conferences for very long. And I saw Jim Smith over on one side of the room, and I thought, I was talking about working with teenagers, and I saw him and I thought, ah, what is he doing with his face? Is that his thinking face? Or is he disagreeing with everything I'm saying? Then I'd say to myself, don't look at Jim. And I'd found some friendly eyes in the middle. That that worked out well. Then I'd look over here and the person over here, he's looking bored. Uh-oh, don't look at look at the lady in the middle. Then I'd look over, don't look at Jim. And I talked to Jim the next day. I said, What was that? I said, Was that what was going on with your face? Oh, he said that was my thinking face. I was thinking that I agree with everything you said. But we make stuff up, don't we? We make stuff up about tests, we make stuff up about the outcome. And the subconscious mind sometimes associates tests with danger. And what's the subconscious mind designed to do? Protect us from danger. So they walk into the testing room, open the exam. Subconscious mind may just trigger the body's stress response. So the body suddenly is prepared to fight, flee, or freeze. Well, you can't flee. Nothing to fight except yourself. So you freeze. And none of that information is going to come. What I have found that's really useful, and I do it all the time when I teach, because I'll say to the students, I said it this morning when I was teaching, I wanted to remember something to share with them, and I said, huh, it's not coming up this minute, but it'll be back any minute now. It'll be back. And then I just went on with something else. Because then you're sending a sub you're sending a signal to your subconscious, here's what I want. So when taking a test, same thing applies. The information is there. It's about sending a request into your subconscious mind. You know, I need the answer to the question number three. But while I'm waiting for that, I'm going to go to question four and five. And as soon as you do that, you allow that space for it to come up. And you can access it. Anyone had that kind of experience?

SPEAKER_00 11:48

All the time. Yeah. Sometimes if it doesn't come back, it just means it wasn't important.

SPEAKER_01 11:57

Well, in a test situation, it might be important. It's going to be if you have to get a certain score. Oh, that's true. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 12:08

My memory of being in school, because I'm I'm a note taker. And I could really learn whatever I wrote. And so when I had to take a test on it, if the material uh if I couldn't answer that question, it was because the section of my memory of the notes was blank. I could have everything else above and below, but there would be pieces of it that just were blank. Like I never wrote them. That's how mine my subconscious worked. Interesting. Yeah, really visual, right?

SPEAKER_01 12:42

Yeah. Well, interesting and inconvenient.

SPEAKER_03 12:47

Yeah, it just would be gone. Nope, you don't you didn't write that down. It's not there. Wow. Yeah. That is unfortunate. I was a good student, so it didn't happen that often, but yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Well, one of the ways that I've taught uh students for years when they're dealing with test anxiety, that's really helpful is to study in a light state of hypnosis and then go back into that light state of hypnosis when they take the test, recreate it. Because they're going to a better recall, they'll be more relaxed. And the other thing for pressure for professional exams, especially for let's say, because I helped so many people with the bar, they would tell me, oh, I've given up exercise, I've given up this, I've given up that, because all I have to study eight hours a day for what is it, six weeks, eight weeks? I don't know, it's crazy. And they have to keep doing the things that relieve their stress. You've got to still take that run if that's your normal behavior. You've got to eat a healthy diet. You've got to quit talking to other bar students who are stressed about the test. Don't talk to them before the test or at lunch. No, no, no. Stay in your little bubble. That little space that you can create for yourself that hypnosis is so good for that just all is good. The information is there. As long as I stay relaxed, I can access it. And I will access it exactly when I need it or very shortly after, before I leave the exam room. And it's been a it's been very effective. I I don't I think the only person who didn't pass the bar exam after I'd worked with him, we had an epiphany during a session one day because he wasn't motivated to study to take the test once more. And he said, all of a sudden he said, Oh, I do know why I'm not motivated. He said, My girlfriend is uh threatened by the thought of being with an attorney. She's fine if he's a law clerk, but it she isn't comfortable with the thought of being with somebody who is an who is a an attorney. So he was limiting himself because he didn't want to lose her. So I don't know if he ever passed. We're such interesting, intricate creatures, aren't we?

SPEAKER_00 15:12

Very complex and highly entertaining. Yes. There's that too.

SPEAKER_01 15:22

That's another time when laughter is going to be good therapy. If you need to relax, seriously, my prep for teaching anymore, I put on my favorite comedian on YouTube, and I don't care if I've listened to the same the same comedian and the same bits. I have them memorized. They're still funny, I still laugh at them, and then when I sit down to teach a class, I'm in a good mood, I'm relaxed, things just flow. And I think the same thing would be true right before studying, right before taking an exam. Do whatever it is that relaxes you. Watch a funny, funny sitcom, relax. It's not, it seems like life or death, but it really isn't.

SPEAKER_04 16:15

And it's interesting that you say that our body kind of gets in that freeze mode because we wanna we need to protect ourselves, and everything is just so highly competitive. You know, it's competitive to get a good score, and then you got to get a good score to get a good job. I mean, there's just layers and layers of competitiveness. So it's you know, it's no um no surprise that we take that on as a threat and get into that freeze mode. Yeah, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 16:47

It is, and and yet I think I don't think that's across the board that that competitiveness. When I spoke with my son-in-law recently, he he does IT security for the Department of Defense, and they're looking to hire new people right out of college with a degree in computer science. And so I was telling him my partner's young son has that, and I was trying to explain what school he'd gone to, and that he almost one more class he'd have a minor, a my his minor would be in math. And my son-in-law said, doesn't matter. Doesn't matter where he went to school, all that matters is he has a bachelor's degree in computer science, period. So maybe there are some, maybe we need to alter our thinking that what if part of life isn't as competitive as we think it is? Because the right job is lined up for us at the right moment if we allow that to happen. True. Yeah. And as soon as you think, as soon as you think it's competitive, your subconscious will find ways to prove that that's true. You know. I've had people say, although no jobs in my field, subconscious, designed to protect us, is going to say, let me narrow your focus. They're out there, but I'm not going to allow you to see them because based on your belief, they don't exist. So I'm just going to keep you, I'm going to agree with you and show you an external experience that matches your belief. Yeah. So maybe it's about changing our expectations and giving ourselves a little bit of a break to relax and it's all good. It's all going to unfold in a way that really is for our highest good, if that's what we expect. Whether it's taking a test or looking for a job or any of those things.

SPEAKER_00 18:43

The universe will acquiesce to what your largest assumptions are.

SPEAKER_01 18:47

There we go. So that's my that's my thought for today on how we can work with test anxiety, but maybe from a different perspective. Hopefully that was some something in there was helpful for someone.

SPEAKER_03 19:08

Great information, Catherine.

SPEAKER_01 19:10

Very good information.

SPEAKER_03 19:11

Thank you, Catherine.

SPEAKER_01 19:12

You're welcome.