Coaching practices for How to Deal with Test Anxiety in High School

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Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• Right before the test or the big moment, my head is so jammed with what-ifs and dread that there’s no room left to actually think
• There’s a big thing coming up
• I save up all my testing for one big nerve-wracking exam at the end, and the pressure of that single shot makes me freeze
• I keep dodging the things that scare me
• There’s a high-stakes thing coming

Practices that may help

1. Write about your worries before a high-stakes performance
   Offload performance anxiety by writing it out in full immediately before the event.
   Choking Under Pressure, Made Practical
2. Apply EFT to specific performance anxiety triggers
   EFT has the strongest self-guided evidence for test anxiety, public speaking, and sports performance stress.
   EFT Tapping: What It Is, How to Do It, and What the Evidence Shows
3. Use frequent low-stakes quizzes rather than rare high-stakes tests
   Regular short quizzes — even without grades — produce more retention than equivalent time spent reviewing.
   The Testing Effect: Why Retrieval Practice Beats Restudying
4. Behavioral experiments
   Test an anxious prediction in real life and compare what you feared with what happened.
   The Anxiety Toolkit, Made Practical
5. Stress Inoculation: Pre-Exposure to Prepare for Future Stress
   Deliberately practice under conditions that simulate the stress of future high-stakes performance.
   Deliberate Discomfort: Using Voluntary Challenge to Build Resilience
6. Set realistic expectations before each exposure
   Before you enter the situation, write down your feared prediction — then check it against reality afterward.
   The Fear Ladder: Graded Exposure Made Practical
7. Havening to clear pre-performance anxiety
   Run a short havening sequence before a high-stakes event to lower physiological anxiety.
   Self-Havening: Calming the Nervous System Through Touch
8. Test worry predictions with small behavioural experiments
   Treat a feared outcome as a hypothesis and design a small real-world test.
   The Worry Tree
9. Rehearse the response before you need it
   Learn and practice the four steps in low-stakes moments so they are available under pressure.
   The DARE Response to Anxiety, Made Practical
10. Use graduated social exposure
    Start with low-stakes social interactions and systematically increase difficulty.
    Overcoming Shyness: Philip Zimbardo’s Framework

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