Is there a situation that affect your SAD the most?

[Darker Than Black]

During exam times, and high stress level times. I get so nervous, and I start stuttering even talking to my friends.., and my parents, and sometimes even while..talking to myself.

When I'm with people, I can't talk. All I'm thinking about is the exams, exams, and exams..what if I do bad, I don't want to fail..omg...I'm so scared, if I fail..should I go K111 myself? T_T...my exams are this week and the next couple of weeks..T_T

 

[dooby-duck]

I'm sure I read somewhere that stuttering is linked with Tourette's, and Tourette's does get worse when you are stressed and anxious. I wondered if there were any Tourette's people on here. I'm pretty certain i have had it since I was a kid. It seems to have stayed pretty constant in all those years. I've had quite a range of tics as well, the worst being one that messed up my breathing. That mixed with the OCD wasn't fun. I only found out a few months ago when I started to research into nervous twitches and it puts a lot of pieces of the jigsaw together.

Anyway, the thing with exams is you can only do your best. Try to think positive. Prepare as best as you can because good preparation will ease your nerves a bit. Exams are challenging especially with nervous and anxiety problems. Good luck with them.

 

[Anubis]

I hear ya, test anxiety is a bitch. It was one of the biggest reasons why I absolutely dreaded tests in undergrad.

The common advice is to do "slow breathing exercises". But they never seemed to work for me. What I'm doing now comes from reading "The Inner Game of Tennis". Instead of attacking every question from the moment I open my exam, I take a more calm approach by first underlining all the verbs in the question. And then I look at the multiple choice questions and group them based on "verb use", "sentence length", etc. (whatever is most convenient). Once this is all done, I actually read the question and then go through the answer choices by the groupings I made. You have no idea how much this has reduced my anxiety. It's gone from "Holy Shit, I want to leave this room, I'm a failure." to "I can do this."

Just for your information, the real tennis advice that correlates to this strategy suggests that you concentrate on the "seams of the ball" as it hurls toward you instead of "actually trying to hit the ball". The logic is that if you focus your mind on the movement of the ball entirely, then the action to hit it comes naturally. So to correlate this with test-taking, if you immerse yourself in the structure of sentence composition and order instead of "getting the right answer", you will naturally understand enough to get it right.

 

[Phobologist]

Hey Darker....

In college during my last quarter, I was so stressed the night before my exam in vector calculus that I was debating the merits of jumping from the 5th story balcony. Im very glad I chose to live. I passed the test and graduated school. Everything was riding on it, and I made it, even though I was sure I would FAIL. SO WILL YOU. I hope this story helps. Don't beleive your scary feelings because they aren't rational, just look at me.

How did I pass a vector calculus test when I was sure I would fail?? Unless my feelings were wrong?