Academic Anxiety Is Likely Why You’re Not Doing So Well In Your Studies

What is academic anxiety? And how can we recognize it and begin to overcome it?

Take a moment to think about how many times you’ve been told to not stress over your upcoming 3,000-word paper, but that calming reassurance wasn’t reassuring enough for you to not stress over it. How many times have you set out a well-defined study plan to cover your course material before the final exam, but ended up with the result of someone that didn’t open a page of the book? If you experience these scenarios semester after semester, then you must consider whether you have developed a case of anxiety, or academic anxiety to be exact. To better understand why this happens you must first understand what anxiety is.

According to the Cornell University Learning Strategies Center, anxiety may be identified as a “series of biochemical changes in your brain and body.” These changes come in the form of an increase in adrenaline, which results in faster heartbeats and a decrease in dopamine, a brain chemical that blocks pain.  When your heart beats faster and you are more susceptible to pain you simply cannot “chill”, “relax”, or “not worry”about your exam. But you can allow that negative wave to dawn on you, and then start afresh. When you suffer from anxiety, you become more susceptible to pain and heightened tension due to your increased heartbeats. When you suffer from anxiety you exit the realm of rationality and enter the realm of doubt, hesitancy, fear, and every other possible deterrent to performance.

Academic anxiety can be triggered by a multitude of factors, some proving more detrimental to one’s mental health than others. Often, academic anxiety can be caused by accumulated stress from parental expectations to excel in studies. The result is that the student reaches a stagnant point and it all goes downhill from there. Other times, academic anxiety can be rooted in investing a great deal of your time and energy into your studies, in order to achieve the required GPA for your scholarship entity. Except as a result of your academic anxiety and decreased self-care, the GPA drops and so does your scholarship.

With both cases, the whole process is the same; anxiety attacks right before exams, hesitance to challenge yourself in your fields of studies, and most importantly (and rather sadly), a lack of confidence in your skills and capabilities. This drop in self-esteem is what would perpetuate the cycle of doom in your performance, more than any of the factors.

The first step to combatting your case of academic anxiety is positivity, as cliché as it may sound, but in this case, we mean systematic conscious positivity. Positivity in acknowledging your capability to overcome the challenges you are presented with, positivity in muting out all the negative voices around you telling you “not to stress over your exam,” and positivity in realizing that only you can push yourself forward. Your second step is keeping track of your thoughts in order to establish a thought schema that will allow you to perform to the best of your abilities. This is a very important step because your thoughts and actions are directly related to your behavior and performance. It is greatly beneficial to note down your most prominent thought at the end of each day, find out what pattern it follows. By doing so, you will notice what triggers your anxiety (fear of failure, external pressures, etc). Building on that you will be able to develop the most relevant mode of positive affirmations to intertwine within your thoughts.

Academic anxiety can come in many forms, please don’t fall into the trap of underestimating it. Additionally, please don’t be demotivated by how it makes you feel. Dwelling on the past certainly will not improve your future. Overcoming academic anxiety will require you to be honest, objective, and disciplined with your thoughts, emotions, and actions. It’s a thousand-mile journey, and it begins with one step – take it.

This article has been written as part of The UAE Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism sponsored by Al Jalila Foundation.

P.S. If you’re facing any sort of mental health issue problems, please refer to this post for suggestions on how to get help.