It's normal to feel nervous before a test. But if you get so nervous that you feel nauseous, get a headache, sweat, or perhaps feel afraid, depressed or overwhelmed, you may be experiencing test anxiety.
Handling test anxiety is important — it's even been found that students with greater test anxiety get lower grades than those who feel less of this anxiety. And researchers in Turkey wanted to see if there was a simple way to help students with this feeling.
In Turkey, students in grade eight — typically around 14 years old — take a centralized high school entrance exam that tests them in math, science, social studies, foreign languages and Turkish. There's a lot of pressure to do well in the exam to get into the best high schools, which will then help students get into top universities.
For the study, 162 grade eight students in two different middle schools were introduced to a breathing exercise program three months before the exam, designed to help them relax and control their stress.
Twice a week over eight weeks, the students were led through a 15- to 20-minute program of breathing exercises, which they did before school.
The program included things like using the diaphragm to take deep breaths, or doing the "lion's breath" from yoga, where you stick out your tongue and exhale forcefully. Students were also taught ways to manage stress, including techniques for reducing stress-producing thoughts.
Before and after the program, the students completed a test that scored their levels of anxiety.
And by the end of the eight-week program, it was found that their anxiety scores decreased by an average of 11%.
The authors say their results show that using breathing exercises in school could be a cheap, effective way to reduce anxiety in middle school students, especially as they prepare for important exams.
So if you've got a test coming up and you're feeling anxious and overwhelmed … first, just breathe.
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