Reduce Test Anxiety with Mindful Breathing
By John M. de Castro, Ph.D.
“Mindfulness training for students gives you tools to help you remain calm, sustain your attention, and be able to focus. It does this by helping you to pay attention to the present moment through simple breathing and meditation practices which increase awareness of thoughts and feelings so as to reduce stress and anxiety and boost levels of attention and concentration.” – Mindfulness for Students
It’s a normal human response to become anxious while being evaluated by others. In fact, the vast majority of students report that the stress and anxiety associated with being evaluated is greater than that produced by anything else in their lives. The majority of students are able to cope with the anxiety and perform on tests in spite of it. But, for a minority of students, somewhere around 16%-20%, the anxiety level is so high that it causes them to “freeze” on tests and markedly impair their performance. It is estimated that they perform 12 points lower, more than one letter grade, on average than students lower in anxiety. Counselling centers in colleges and universities report that evaluation anxiety is the most common complaint that they treat among students.
It has been demonstrated repeatedly that mindfulness counteracts anxiety and mindfulness training is an effective treatment for a variety of forms of anxiety. Mindfulness training has been shown to be effective for anxiety disorders in general and in relieving test anxiety. But, mindfulness training has not been directly compared to other antianxiety therapies. Cognitive reappraisal is a therapeutic technique that prompts the individual to rethink their interpretations of events and their feelings about them. For example, a student failing a test may think that this demonstrates that they are stupid and unworthy. Cognitive reappraisal of this would result in thinking that anxiety interfered with their studying and their performance. This therapy has also been shown to be effective for anxiety disorders.
In today’s Research News article “The Effectiveness of Daily Mindful Breathing Practices on Test Anxiety of Students.” See:
or see summary below or view the full text of the study at:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5072593/
Cho and colleagues test the effectiveness of both mindfulness training and cognitive reappraisal for test anxiety. They recruited highly anxious university students and randomly assigned them to either 7-days of mindful breathing exercises, cognitive reappraisal, or no treatment. Instruction in mindful breathing and cognitive reappraisal occurred in a 1 hour, therapist guided, training session followed by 7 days of verified daily practice. The students were measured both before and after training for test anxiety, positive thoughts, and positive emotions.
They found that both mindful breathing and cognitive reappraisal produced clinically significant decreases in test anxiety in comparison to the control condition. But, only mindful breathing produced increases in positive thoughts. Hence, both mindful breathing and cognitive reappraisal were found to be effective treatments for test anxiety, but, mindful breathing has an additional benefit of increasing the individual’s automatic positive thoughts about themselves. Although not tested here, this would suggest that mindful breathing would have more long lasting effects on test anxiety.
These are exciting results in that a brief therapy, only lasting a week, and involving only an hour per student of therapist time, produced a major reduction in test anxiety. This suggests that these therapies can be administered cost effectively to large numbers of test anxiety sufferers. This is important due to the large number of students effected by test anxiety and the limited resources available to treat them.
Both mindful breathing and cognitive reappraisal are thought to effect anxiety by producing a distancing and disidentification of themselves from the contents of their conscious thoughts and emotions. This is known as decentering and indicates a reduction in self-criticism, rumination, and anxiety that can arise when reacting to negative thinking patterns. This decentering then counteracts anxiety by depersonalizing the feelings, making them just feelings and not indicative of some problem with the individual. Mindfulness training is known to improve emotion regulation allowing the individual to fully experience the feelings yet react to them more adaptively. This may account for the additional benefit of mindful breathing of increasing positive thoughts.
So, reduce test anxiety with mindful breathing.
“Often, when you are trying to remember important information, it is natural to tense your body or strain your mind, but this actually impedes your ability to recall information. In fact, a deeply relaxed state can enhance your ability to access memories in the moment. No matter your skill level, going into a standardized test relaxed instead of stressed will probably earn you more points.” – Suzanne Pearman
CMCS – Center for Mindfulness and Contemplative Studies
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Study Summary
Cho, H., Ryu, S., Noh, J., & Lee, J. (2016). The Effectiveness of Daily Mindful Breathing Practices on Test Anxiety of Students. PLoS ONE, 11(10), e0164822. http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0164822
Abstract
The present study examined the effectiveness of daily mindful breathing practices on test anxiety of university students. A total of 36 participants were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: a training mindful breathing condition (n = 12), a training cognitive reappraisal condition (contrast group, n = 12), and a non-training condition (control group, n = 12). Each of the participants trained by themselves for 6 days after they had taken one session of education for mindful or cognitive reappraisal practices. They wrote their experiences on daily worksheets and sent it by mobile with taking pictures that were confirmed by the researcher. Before and after training, each of the participants completed a questionnaire to assess: test anxiety, positive thought, and positive affect. The results of the study showed that both mindful breathing practice and cognitive reappraisal practice yielded large effect sizes in reducing test anxiety. In addition, the mindful breathing condition scored significantly higher on positive thoughts than the cognitive reappraisal and control conditions. The findings of this study suggest that both daily mindful breathing and cognitive reappraisal practices were effective in reducing test anxiety; however, mindful breathing increased positive automatic thoughts to a greater extent than cognitive reappraisal.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5072593/