Episode Details

To perform well you do need a certain amount of stress to help propel you forward towards your goal. To produce optimal performance during a challenging situation like a test, you’ll need to be mentally and physically alert. You are not going to perform well on an exam sleepy and unfocused.

Take A Look at the Yerkes-Dodson Curve | CLICK THE LINK BELOW https://aceanytest.com/test-anxiety-the-yerkes-dodson-curve/

The right amount of stress and alertness to produce optimal performance is call “arousal”. The problem is if the intensity of arousal gets too high then you enter the realm of anxiety, worry and overwhelm and end up with the exact opposite of optimal performance, and your mental and physical alertness declines. Too much fear and anxiety can create static within the mind and make logical thinking difficult.

Now the right level of arousal for optimal performance can be tracked on the Yerkes – Dodson Curve. In the early 1900s, two psychologists were researching peak performance and discovered that the right amount of arousal can produce optimal performance results.

The bottom line, going left and right, represents your arousal or your stress level, the line moving up and down represents your performance. So you can see that a certain amount of arousal, a certain amount of stress, can put you in the optimal zone for peak performance, the green zone, the right amount of stress can put you in the zone for growth and learning. But you need to harness it, because if you keep producing that mental and emotional arousal then you can end up in anxiety, panic, breakdown and burnout and it crashes into the ground. If you don’t control that arousal it will turn into stress, anxiety and panic and you’ll end up in the red zone.

When studying for a test, someone on the far left in the blue zone, they have little arousal, they’re bored, disengaged, they’re not going to study very hard for very long, and probably not do well on the test. Over on the far right, in the dark orange and red zones, there is so much anxiety and panic you leave the “optimal” zones here in green in the middle, your confidence and self-esteem start to decline, you have trouble focusing and thinking logically, you may feel fatigued, even sick, and your ability to study, remember the information, or take a test diminishes greatly, performance declines.

You can also look at this like drinking coffee. If you’re a coffee drinker then you know that a cup of coffee can give you a boost of energy and focus, but too much coffee can make you jittery and make it hard to focus and think clearly.

To borrow an analogy from author Glennon Doyle, true anxiety feels purposeful, something we feel driven or motivated to take action (we want to pass the test, cross the finish line first). True anxiety can also be a deep inner knowing or intuition that something isn’t right (walking into the dark alley, hearing the rattlesnake in the bushes near the trail your hiking). However, false anxiety has a high-frequency trill of fear attached to it. It’s got a lower vibration, a longer wavelength.

Now the Yerkes – Dodson Curve shows that some arousal helps us get to peak performance. And if you think about it, a test is a performance. When thinking of someone giving a performance you may think of a musician, or an actor on the stage, or an athlete. But performance is also defined as “the execution of an action, something accomplished, the ability to perform.”

And that is what a test is. A test or exam is showing what you know about that subject. To pass a test we must have the ability to perform well, to execute the action of taking the test well. Just like an athlete, musician or actor, you have to perform at your best in that moment. You must bring all that you know, all that you learned, studied and trained for, into the pre