Thread by @bazzapower

[THREAD] I want to take sometime to discuss exam, presentation and deadline anxiety. It is a question I get multiple times per week and debilitates a lot of students and professionals. So let’s dive a little deeper into it, why it happens and if we can overcome it.

First of all, performance anxiety is not a different type of anxiety per say. Usually, those of us who have it have anxiety in other areas of our life. But performance anxiety can directly affect results and increase our mental health distress.

The root of performance anxiety is society based. When parents put too much pressure on kids and schools have this attitude that failing exams can ruin our life, it is easy to realize why we put so much pressure on ourselves to perform. However, that pressure can backfire.

Memorizing, attention span and focus are key to doing well in these performances. But at the same time, anxiety affects those right away and our capacity is being reduced because of it. Rather than using an encouraging form of support, schools and parents use the one that harms.

Just like any form of anxiety, it is the cycle of fear that keeps it going. We tend to fear failing or doing something embarrassing in a presentation, which in turn makes us unable to study or prepare adequately which then increases anxiety again and the cycle goes on.

Is there a way to recover from this? Yes, absolutely. Awareness of why we feel that anxiety and the fact that even if we fail at certain things, it doesn’t reflect on us and our intelligence can help. We often internalize our identity with our performance, but they are different.

Also, it is important to start preparing way before the deadline because the closer it gets, the more stressed out we are. Ideally, the day before we shouldn’t do anything besides relax because our stress levels would be too high to be able to be productive.

While preparing, it is important to do it in small amounts with a lot of breaks in between and to increase our self-care a lot in order to match the increase in stress that happens. We can’t force ourselves to study or prepare. That will just lead to frustration.

It is important to also get support from classmates or colleagues going through similar situations. It allows us not to feel lonely and have a support system in place that can help us navigate those emotions and the material itself.

However, if this is a trend that keeps happening all the time, then it is important to get professional help. It will allow us to work through those emotions and that stress and reduce our overall anxiety, which will be so beneficial when it comes to performance anxiety.