Mar 1, 2024
About the episode
This episode is packed with practical advice and techniques designed to help educators, students, and professionals manage and thrive in the face of test anxiety. By addressing the physiological and psychological aspects of stress, we aim to unlock everyone's potential to 'Slay the Test' with confidence and success.
Key Points
Fight or Flight Mode: Learn how this response can make accessing knowledge difficult, drawing parallels with Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Physiological Impacts: Discover how stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline affect memory retrieval and decision-making abilities.
Strategies for Overcoming Anxiety:
Deep Breathing: A simple technique to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, calming the mind and body.
Progressive Muscle Relaxation: An exercise that involves tensing and relaxing different muscle groups to reduce stress.
Mindfulness and Meditation: Techniques to focus the mind and promote a state of calm.
Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) or Tapping: A method to reduce anxiety by tapping on specific body points while focusing on positive mantras.
Starfish Meditation: A breathing and focusing exercise that can be discreetly practiced to ease nerves.
Magical quotes from the episode
What happens when you're in this permanent stress response is that you cannot recall or the information that you know, and I'm sure we've all had students say things like, 'My mind goes blank' or 'I can't remember things' like they actually know the material.
Stress hormones disrupt the functioning of the hippocampus in the brain, the area that's responsible for retrieving memories and information. These hormones decrease prefrontal cortex activity, the area we use to make decisions, making it difficult to recall information and to make decisions.
Deep breathing is one way to activate the vagus nerve, which will activate that parasympathetic nervous system and calm down the testing anxiety, taking you out of fight or flight mode.
