Overcome TEST ANXIETY with Hypnotherapy!
"My daughter is very bright, but she panics when she has to take tests."
"I can't sleep the night before a test."
"My problem with the test is my nerves."
"I'm just too up tight to do well. I'm really worried about taking the test again."
TEST ANXIETY is a form of stress; a psychological and physiological response related to events that upset our personal balance. It is a basic human emotion consisting of fear and uncertainty. One of the most stressful situations that causes anxiety for students is testing.
Fear of performing poorly on tests may overwhelm a student and consequently affect behaviour and health. The resulting negative outcomes range from psychological distress and insecurity to poor academic performance and even failure. Frequently, the inability to achieve the desired results is not because of the lack of cognitive ability, rather, extreme levels of test anxiety.
When students are not able to control their emotions, they may experience higher levels of stress, thereby making it more difficult for them to concentrate.
Symptoms of Test Anxiety:
- Physical: rapid heart beat, headaches, shortness of breath, light-headedness or fainting, nausea, diarrhea, extreme body temperature changes, excessive sweating and dry mouth.
- Emotional: high levels of fear and depression, disappointment, anger, uncontrollable crying or laughing and feelings of helplessness.
- Behavioural: nervous fidgeting, pacing, substance abuse, avoidance.
- Cognitive: feelings of dread, racing thoughts, negative self-talk, 'going blank', difficulty concentrating and focusing, difficulty thinking logically.
Hypnotherapy and NLP for test anxiety teach several simple behaviours to help the brain perform a complex task well. One of the main NLP tools taught to students is a technique called anchoring. With anchoring, clients are taught to remember a time when they had a major accomplishment and their self-esteem and self-confidence were very high. Then they mentally re-create those feelings, they are instructed to squeeze two fingers together while experiencing those feelings. The good feelings are being amplified and magnified in trance and that creates an anchor (or trigger) for these strong positive feelings. The next step is mentally going back to a testing situation, when patients create a mental movie of a successfully taken test (written and oral). Simultaneously they are instructed to fire off the trigger of the self-esteem/confidence anchor by squeezing the two fingers together again.
At this point the subconscious connects the emotions of self-esteem/confidence and achievement to the motion of taking a test. Finally at the end, clients become a lot more confident about their ability to take tests, and it gives them a positive expectation of future success. It also makes them a lot calmer during the actual test, so their focusing, concentrating and recalling abilities improve significantly.
Another benefit of NLP for test anxiety is that clients find it becomes difficult to focus on stressful thoughts; as their minds automatically move them away for relaxing thoughts instead!
Patients who are properly using NLP for test anxiety, also find these techniques greatly help in relieving stress and improving concentration in many areas of their lives and therefore it improves the quality of their work and social lives as well.