Before you begin reading, take a deep breath. You’re likely here because you have a test or exam coming up soon, and you’re looking for support. Feeling anxious is completely normal, and nothing to be ashamed of. It’s also frequently exacerbated by everything else going on in your life, community, and the world. You’re in the right place. Let’s walk through some calming and supportive strategies to help you manage test anxiety and stress.


1) Keep an open conversation with your body and what it needs


First and foremost: nutrition, hydration, sleep, and movement are a magic quartet. Here are a few tips for each:


Food


Ensure that you’re eating meals and snacks that feel good for your body. Your food intake the night before a test or exam—and even a few days before—is also more important than it might seem! Similar to the way an athlete might meal prep for a week before their competition, nourishing your body is just as important the night before a test as it is the morning of. Further, your brain’s primary fuel source is something called glucose, which tends to come from carbohydrate-rich foods like bread, pasta, rice, potatoes, crackers, fruit, and vegetables. If you’re looking for study or test day snacks, these are great places to start! Proteins and fats are energy sources that last longer and take your body a bit longer to digest and turn into fuel. Proteins and fats complement carbohydrates, and include things like Greek yogurt, cheese, hummus, beans, nuts, and meats.


Water


Of course, drinking enough water not only supports digestion, it ensures that your body is hydrated by increasing the volume of blood—and ease with which it’s pumped by your heart—throughout your whole body. As you might be imagining, increasing your blood volume is especially important for the blood travelling to your brain on test day! Staying hydrated isn’t just about water, too. Non-caffeinated beverages that aren’t too saturated with sugar and salt are also hydrating, such as a cup of tea in the afternoon or evening. Drinking caffeinated beverages like coffee isn’t bad—we all love them, especially when we want to focus!—just ensure you’re balancing them with enough water (1:1 is usually a good approximate metric to use).


Sleep


Alongside nutrition and hydration, sleep is critical, and similarly requires long-term consistency. Make sure you’re getting enough sleep a few days before your test or exam, not just the night before. Although this may feel counterintuitive, cramming extra study hours into the night before an exam is always less effective than using that time to sleep. When you sleep well, you’re better able to think through and recall or remember material that you’re unsure of.


Movement


Lastly, movement supports the functioning of nutrition, hydration, and sleep. Exercising between study sessions and on the day of your test or exam boosts your body’s metabolism and brain sharpness, especially if it’s right before! Exercise also doesn’t need to look like a “hard” workout—it can be whatever form of movement makes your body feel good. Maybe it’s a game of Twister with your friends or siblings in the living room, learning a few new dance trends on TikTok, or a refreshing walk in the park with a pet.


2) Study Tips for the Day Before


Final studying time! This may feel like the most overwhelming day of preparation, even with weeks of studying behind you. If you feel overwhelmed, or like the amount of content to cover suddenly feels mountainous, try engaging with ‘bigger’ study materials. This can include the wall-sized whiteboards and blackboards in classrooms, bristol boards, or their digital equivalents (such as a tool like Figma). Using these materials can feel supportive because they offer a sense of confidence-in-control when you feel anxious or stressed: you can see everything in one place, as if from a bird’s-eye-view, whether you’re doing practice problems, drawing diagrams, creating charts, or mapping thought webs. Pairing this practice with the Pomodoro method, for example, can be helpful to ensure that you take frequent breaks. Bonus points if you follow along with your favorite ASMR creator on YouTube or TikTok.


Another method to include could be talking to yourself out loud: ask yourself questions and answer them as if explaining a concept to a friend. You can also record the audio of your responses and listen to the recording during your movement breaks!


3) Create Supportive Lists to Displace Stress and Anxiety


At some point, your thoughts may start to tangle the threads of everything else you need to do. Your brain may trick you into thinking that every task is more important than studying, rest, nutrition, movement, or hydration. Something to try could be finding a blank, large piece of paper, and using it to write down all of your tasks and to-dos that aren’t test- or exam- related. Find two coloured highlighters and assign each a label: “must be done today” and “can wait until after my test”. Highlight each thing you wrote down with the corresponding colour, and notice that most things can wait until after your test. Now that they’re on paper, they’re safe there until you’re finished writing your test or exam—you can trust that you won’t forget them.



You may also want to create a list of symptoms or experiences you tend to struggle with on test day. Next to each, write down how you might navigate them should they arise. Here is an example list, which you’re welcome to adopt or adjust as needed:


Physical experiences may include…


  • Excessive sweating → in your backpack, pack a change of clothes, a cloth to wipe yourself off in the washroom, and an antiperspirant that you feel confident in.

  • Nausea, vomiting or digestive issues → bring arrowroot cookies or graham crackers, Ginger Ale, warm water in a bottle, orange juice, or lemon water.

  • Rapid heartbeat → have a few breathing exercises handy to steady yourself. Controlling your breathing helps to control your heart rate.

  • Shortness of breath → bring ice water or plan to let ice cold water from the sink run over your wrists.

  • Lightheaded or faint → find and know a place where you can go to sit or lay down safely at the test venue.

  • Headaches → pack some Advil, Ibuprofen, or a comforting tea, such as peppermint or chamomile, in a thermos.

  • Panic attacks, which can feel like a heart attack → if you’re prone to these, or have experienced them in the past, make a plan with your test proctor, professor, or teacher.


Emotional experiences may include…


  • Self-doubt, insecurity

  • Fear, helplessness

  • Hopelessness

  • Feelings of inadequacy

  • Anger or irritability

  • Negative self-talk

  • Racing thoughts


To manage these, you could try a soothing and joyful self-care app, such as Finch. You could also ask a loved one to text you a kind message on test day. Perhaps they could pre-record and ‘schedule-send’ a voice message that’s calming and encouraging to soothe your anxiety and stress. You could also choose a few videos on YouTube or TikTok and save them in a folder called “Test Day”. These  videos should be feel-good videos that you love, and enact happiness, calm, or nostalgia. Maybe it’s a clip of baby animals, a performance of a song you love, or a snippet of your favourite childhood show. Short ASMR videos can also be helpful—many are intentionally themed around stress, studying, and test/exam anxiety.


It’s also important to note that if any of the above symptoms feel—or have felt in the past—particularly debilitating, it’s always okay to communicate this to your proctor, professor, or teacher. It’s helpful if you can let them know before test or exam day, but if something happens the day of—that’s never happened before—don’t be afraid to communicate it. Arrangements, adjustments, and care can almost always be offered, no matter how “important” or “formal” the test or exam setting is.


You may also wish to create a post-exam/test plan for relaxing and recovering. Make a list of a few things you might like to do, and save the list on your phone or a sticky note in your pocket so it’s handy when you finish.


4) Plan For Test Day


On the day of your test, you’ll want to arrive early so you have plenty of time to eat a snack, prepare other snacks, drink water and fill your water bottle, and use the washroom. Decide how much time you need to enter the headspace that you’d like to be in for test day, so that you feel prepared, comfortable, and confident. If you’re particularly anxious or stressed, you may need an hour or more, and that’s completely okay.


When you sit down and the timer begins, read your whole test through. Answer questions you can respond to confidently, first. Doing these first helps build momentum and confidence. Then, approach questions you’re not 100% sure of, but can attempt to answer. If there are questions you truly don’t know how to answer, don’t spend any more time on them. If you have a few extra minutes at the end, return to these to see if anything has come to mind that you could include for partial credit. Triaging your test writing can help you stay calm by feeling a sense of control over the process. You’ve got this!


Remember: Taking 15-seconds of deep breaths or box breaths, four times during the test, will only use one minute of your total time! Reset and ground yourself as needed. If you don’t have one, you may want to wear a simple watch, just to help you keep track of test-time-remaining and any breathing exercises.


After you walk out of the test or exam room, know that everything will be okay. Control what you can control—the test is now out of your hands. You did the best job that the version of you, in those few hours, could have done. Hindsight is always 20/20.


Remember the post-test/exam plan you created? Pull it out, and choose one or a few things that might feel supportive now.


Finally, don’t ever forget: success on tests and exams does not determine your worth, intelligence, or capability as a human being. Tests and exams are part of education and building a career, which is a system that operates—was invented!—separately from your immense value in your community and family. We tend to feel most anxious when we care about an outcome or relationship, which isn’t a bad thing! But know that your worth cannot be measured in numbers, letters, or percentages, least of all by a test or exam score.