Hello everyone, hope you have read my previous blog post on Exam Phobia. If you haven’t read it yet, I would suggest you to read that first. That post will tell you more about exam phobia and the extent of damage it can do to someone’s life. Here we will learn about some important management tips for exam phobia. These tips will help you to effectively deal with exam phobia, if you are experiencing it. Moreover, these pointers will also help you to prevent it. So, here we go…

Exam Phobia Management Tips for Parents

  1. Take it easy when it comes to communicating the aims and aspirations you have with regard to your children. If you try to be too edgy or strong with them, then they may end up being scared from failures and challenges in life. This in itself would be the first step towards exam phobia.
  2. Dominant, aggressive parenting styles do irreparable damage to a child’s or student’s life. Being a democratic parent is worthwhile both for you and your children. Being too dominant, aggressive, and punitive on your children when it comes to studies and achievements often creates or aggravates exam phobia.
  3. Never not to compare your ward with others. This is the worst mistake that often parents do. This hampers your child’s personality, thought processes, self-worth, self-esteem and confidence.
  4. Try to build a conducive environment where your child or the aspirant can study without getting disturbed.
  5. Often rewarding a successful achievement or consoling a failure helps a lot in effectively dealing with or preventing exam phobia.
  6. Try to be a role model for your children. If you yourself are struggling with your own failures, challenges and issues, you can never do justice to your children too. Life would obviously set many thorns in your path. It’s how you deal with these thorns and at the same time be a role model for your ward too.
  7. Make your child have a certain vision, ambition and mission in his/her life. The clearer he/she is about his/her future, the more he/she will be capable of making dedicated efforts to achieve such goals.
  8. Rather than making success or failure as an aim, try making healthy participation an aim for your child. This will help him/her to understand the worth of his/her studies and achieve milestones accordingly.

Exam Phobia Management Tips for Students/aspirants

  • Try to build loads of self-confidence and self-worth within yourself. Do not let others overpower you. Do not let failures pull you back or a success make you over-confident. Balancing is the key.
  • Try to maintain a good and healthy lifestyle first. If you yourself are unhealthy or if you would lead an unhealthy lifestlye this would affect your body and mind leading to different physical and psychological problems.
  • Daily exercise, a good peer group, having a definite aim in life, good dietary habits, a healthy and consistent sleep regime, etc are some of the healthy and worthy ways to keep exam phobia at bay.
  • Most students do not read at the starting of a semester. They get serious only when the exam dates are hanging on their heads. If you are also one of them, then you need to seriously work on your studying habits.
  • Maintain a good and strategic studying habit. Read from the starting of a year or semester. Be regular in attending your classes. Apart from that make your notes with dilligence and finesse, clear doubts…these habits will not only help you prevent and manage exam phobia but will enhance your knowledge and help you pass your exams with flying colours.
  • Just rote learning or surface memorization is not enough. Try to go to the deeper concepts of the topics.
  • The more you have expertise on a topic, the more you practice it…the stronger would be its impressions in your brain (memory chunks) and will be remembered for a longer time.
  • Proper time management will help you keep decent pace in your studies, preparation, project works, practical works, and other assignments from time-to-time.
  • Exams often foster competitive spirit among students. While a healthy competition with others is appreciated. But, the actual competition should be with you and within you. How much you know, how much you should know and how can you know more….these aspects matter more than comparing and competing unnecessarily with others.

Always remember that success and failures are all a part of life. With persistent efforts you can attain your goal one day. What is important is your participation.

If you have read my previous post on the technical know-how and symptoms of exam phobia, if you or anyone related to you are struggling with exam phobia, then please don’t hesitate in contacting us. Through our online phobia therapy program we offer expert online cognitive behavior therapy interventions for exam phobia.

“The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.” 
– Vince Lombardi

With Best Wishes,

Sareeta