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Dr. Aziz asks an audience to rate his nervousness and they say 1 or 2, but he says he feels 8 or 10. The gap shows why fighting anxiety during tests or speeches backfires: you burn mental energy managing the feeling instead of doing the thing.
Dr. Aziz asks an audience to rate his nervousness and they say 1 or 2, but he says he feels 8 or 10. The gap shows why fighting anxiety during tests or speeches backfires: you burn mental energy managing the feeling instead of doing the thing.
I got up in front of the room. And I knew at that point, I was not comfortable speaking in front of groups. That's why I signed up for it. And so the beginning of the talk, I said, "All right, I have a question for you all before I get into the content, which is test anxiety. On a scale of 1 to 10, how nervous do you think I am right now?" Usually the answers were low numbers, 2, 1, 0, 3. And I was like, "Mm, I'm about an 8 right now." A 10. And their eyes got wide and their jaw dropped because what I was demonstrating to them was exactly what I was going to teach them about test anxiety, which is that you can do you and there can be anxiety present. And that the more we need to hide the anxiety or fix the anxiety or get rid of the anxiety, now I can't focus on the test because I'm like, I'm so anxious, I got to get rid of this anxiety. And I got to— and instead of taking the test, I'm battling the anxiety. And same thing when it comes to speaking in the group.
