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Crush the Test by Crushing Your Test Anxiety [Episode 521]

In this episode Dr. Ben Bernstein, author of Crush Your Test Anxiety, explains the role of mind, body, and spirit in performance enhancement. [SHOW SUMMARY]

While aptitude tests are increasingly optional in graduate admissions, tests are a constant in graduate school and frequently in one’s career. How can you manage your stress and anxiety when facing a test, be it the MCAT, LSAT, MCAT, GRE, licensing exams, continuing education exams, or subject exams while in school? How can you perform at your best during a test? Dr. Bernstein will tell you how.

An interview with author, coach, psychologist, and educator, Dr. Ben Bernstein, on how to crush text anxiety to raise test scores. [SHOW NOTES]

Welcome to the 521st episode of Admissions Straight Talk. Thanks for joining me. Before we meet our guest, I’d like to highlight the featured resource for today’s episode, Fitting In & Standing Out: The Paradox at the Heart of Admissions. Realize that the challenge at the heart of admissions is showing that you both fit in at your target schools and are a standout in the applicant pool. Accepted’s free download, Fitting In & Standing Out: The Paradox at the Heart of Admissions, will show you how to do both. Master this paradox and you are well on your way to acceptance.

Our guest today is Dr. Ben Bernstein, author of Crush Your Test Anxiety, and presenter of the masterclass by the same name, Dr. Bernstein or Dr. B as he prefers to be known, has been a performance coach for a wide variety of top performers, including Academy Award, Tony Award, and Pulitzer Prize winners, as well as CEOs, athletes, physicians, opera singers, and actors. Dr. Bernstein is the author of Crush Your Test Anxiety and three other books. He also posts regularly on Psychology Today. Dr. Bernstein graduated from Bowdoin College and earned his doctorate in applied psychology from the University of Toronto. In addition, he holds a master’s degree in music composition from Mills College. Parallel to his career in psychology and education, Dr. Bernstein has extensive involvement in the performing arts. 

Dr. Bernstein, thanks for being a guest on Admissions Straight Talk. [2:21]

It is totally my pleasure, Linda. Thank you for inviting me.

My pleasure. Let’s start with something really basic. What is a performance psychologist? [2:29]

Well, a performance psychologist is a term that I gave myself because I didn’t know that one existed and the reason I gave it to myself was I was trained as a therapist, but when I started in private practice, I found that I didn’t really take to that form of work, meaning that I’m a very active guy and I was really wanting to coach people more than do therapy with them, and so that meant I just started looking at where people wanted to perform better in their lives. Early on, it was parents or teachers, but then it became athletes and actors and dentists and doctors, and so that’s what I do is that I’m really looking for what a person’s potential is and what may be getting in the way of that. So we’re looking at their performance, and hence, I’m a performance psychologist.

How did you get into it? Was it just a matter of the fact that you didn’t care for more traditional forms of therapy or- [3:36]

No, thank you though. It’s a good question. So I started out, as a young child, I was brought up in New York City, and I was a very prodigious piano player. I love playing piano, and I played very well. However, that got, sidetracked is not quite the right word, but I got pushed into recitals and competitions and national auditions and all the kinds of things that a seven, eight, nine, 10 year old might, me, really did not like, and I had severe performance anxiety. And no one helped me, actually. It was all like, what’s the matter with you and you’ll grow out of it and it’s all in your head and all these things that were completely not helpful.

I stopped playing the piano at age 14 completely. Didn’t pick it up again for almost 30 years, but what lingered in the background was that all this anxiety about performing, and it morphed into getting up in class or giving speeches and even acting because I loved getting on stage, but I had so much anxiety. So I had to actually find the way through this myself, through a lot of introspection and therapy and good teaching, really good teachers. Part of what I feel about life is that we’re all here to serve and this is my best way of serving people, which is to help them or work with them through their performance issues so they can perform at their best.

That’s a very interesting answer. Thank you for that. So it was really a combination of your own experience combined with your training, really. [5:12]

Exactly, yeah, and I would say also combined with a faith, belief that we’re all here to really serve the greater good. We’re all here to help each other in one way. You’re doing it in your way, I’m doing it in my way. So we find our way to doing that pretty much through our own experiences.

I recently read a quote by the late Rabbi Lord Dr. Jonathan Sacks, and it was that our mission is to do what we like doing, I’m paraphrasing, obviously, I don’t have it memorized, what we are meant to do is what we like doing, and what the world needs done. [5:38]

I love it. That’s perfect.

And I thought that was brilliant. [5:59]

It is. It’s perfect. What the world needs, exactly.

And what we enjoy. It’s a combination. It’s both of them. [6:04]

You bet. Totally.

Let’s go back to the topic of performance and what sometimes inhibits performance, let’s say, and that is stress or anxiety. What are those things? Are they different? Are they the same? [6:10]

Well, no, they’re not the same. They’re different. They may trigger each other. Anxiety usually is a fear of what’s coming. You’re anxious about a test that you’re going to take or a speech you’re going to give or a performance review you’re going to have. It’s a fear often associated with what’s coming down the pike. Stress is different, and this is a really important question in terms of the work that I do. So the reason why is because there’s a known scientifically proven relationship between stress and performance. We know this from over 100 years of research, that stress affects performance and it’s a bell curve. Too little stress, you have to imagine a curve, too little stress, performance goes down, you don’t care, what’s the difference.

Too much stress, you’re freaked out and performance goes down, but in that top of the curve is where you actually have just the right amount of stress and that’s where you perform at your best. Now, having said that, most people really have, I have to say the wrong idea about what stress is because I talk all over the world and I ask people, what is stress, and they say things like, “Well, stress is my kids and stress is my spouse. Stress is the government, stress is taxes, stress is climate change, stress is COVID,” and it’s all what I call carpal tunnel finger pointing syndrome, pointing the finger at other things, which actually suggests, if you think about it for a minute, if all those things change, my kids calm down, my mother-in-law went away, my taxes stopped, COVID was all over, then my life would totally work.

Well, it just does not work like that. This is all life. So what is stress? Stress is what we experience when we react to certain life events, and particularly when we don’t like something, it’s not happening the way we want it to happen, we get frustrated or angry and we feel stressed. We think it’s the other person causing that, but the other person is just the other person, and it’s our reaction to that. Now, certain things in life, definitely certain life events are more stress provoking. You get ill, a bank fails, they can provoke that kind of reaction, but stress is what you feel because what I say is because you’re actually disconnecting, and I could go into that further, but it’s a different definition of stress.

How does disconnection come in? [9:00]

Well, disconnection comes in very important ways. I’m going to take the macro level first, which is quantum physics and all of spirituality basically says the same thing, which is that we all-

And you’re going to do it in less than three minutes, all quantum physics and spirituality. [9:12]

This is like a quiz show, Linda. Now, I’m going to do it in two.

But we’ve already used up about 20 seconds. Okay, quantum physics and all schools of spirituality basically teach the same thing, which is that everything is interconnected. There is no separation. That’s very hard for us to get our heads around, but think about it this way. When you’re taking a test, when you’re giving a speech, when you’re in your kitchen, when you’re driving a car, there are three parts of you, your body, your mind, and your spirit. When all three parts are operating at top level, stress is just at the right place, but when you disconnect in your body, your mind, or the spirit, that’s when you experience stress.

So disconnection in the body would mean, for instance, when you stop breathing. I watch thousands of people take tests and they stop breathing right at the first minute. Your brain is getting the message that you’re dying, stress is going up, performance going down. So I don’t know if I’ve used up my three minutes, but we disconnect in the body. In the mind, we disconnect because we say to ourselves, I can’t handle this. I’m not able. I’m incapable, negative disconnection, and then the spirit, which is the thing we talk least about, but I think it’s the most important, we disconnect because we either don’t have a goal for our spirit to be focused or we keep getting distracted. When we disconnect, that’s when we feel stress.

But you also said that stress can be a good thing. [10:38]

Yes. A certain amount of stress is necessary. The reason why is because we’re never going to be without stress. I was on an airplane and somebody asked me what I did and I said stress doctor because people call me that, and he said, “Well, the absence of stress is death,” and I said, “How do you know? Nobody knows what that’s like, but life is stress provoking because there’s always going to be challenging situations. We’re always going to disconnect a little bit. The key is not to disconnect so much that you feel stressed and then your performance goes down. You’re always connecting, reconnecting, disconnecting. So just some of that is okay, but too much of that is going to drive your performance down.

How can stress or non-academic issues, and by non-academic, I mean non-knowledge related issues, impede performance on a test? [11:33]

Well, I’ve watched thousands of people take tests and if you watch them carefully, really carefully, you’ll see that when they open the textbook, literally, they pull it up on the screen, they go, huh. So this is for the people who are listening. I just held my breath. Now, when you hold your breath, what’s the message your brain is getting? You’re dying. So is your stress going up or down? Of course, it’s going up. That’s a disconnection, and if you keep doing that for three or four hours, two things happen. You become exhausted, which happens to many test takers on big tests, and also your reasoning ability, your ability to really think just goes down. So that’s a very simple thing.

Another example would be that you look at an item, well, this is a little bit more content related. You look at an item and you think, I don’t know. I don’t understand this. I don’t know what it means. That’s a confidence issue. No test is going to give you something that’s completely out of the domain of what that test is going to be or what you studied, or another non-academic issue would be you get distracted. If you’re in a room with people taking tests and somebody starts to wipe their brow or cough or sigh and you get distracted by all that, you’re disconnecting, your stress is going to go up. So it’s a great question actually because most people think it’s about academic issues and it’s not. So I appreciate the question a lot.

What kind of non-academic prep can enhance performance on exam day? [13:18]

All kinds of things. So one thing is that I teach people something called three point breathing, which I’m happy to offer to all your listeners, and the way this works is that, but you have to train with this if you’re about to take an exam. You can’t just do it on test day because you have to really be practiced. Three point breathing, you exhale before you read a question, you exhale before you read the answer choices, and the third point is you exhale after you bubble in an answer. Now what that does is it keeps you from holding your breath so you’re able to stay in a much more, I’m going to say relaxed state throughout the course of the test, and you don’t get tired at the end of three hours and you’re able to think more clearly. So that helps a lot of people over the years that I trained to do that, but again, you have to practice this. You just can’t do it on test day.

It’d probably be great to practice independent of tests and then perhaps on practice exams. [14:22]

Definitely. Definitely. And how about the rest of your life?

True too. [14:24]

Well, but you think about it. Just anticipating you’re going to have a performance review with your boss, if you really check in with your breath, chances are when you’re thinking about that, most likely, you’re going to be holding your breath if you’re feeling anxious about it. Holding the breath and anxiety are completely connected. So you practice more, but the way you do it, it’s not complicated. If you feel that nervousness starting to ramp up, the sooner you catch it and you exhale and you feel the chair under you and you just let go, it’s going to help you. What happens with most people is that they will wait too long when they’re really ramped up and then the tools are minimally helpful. They’re helpful, but they can’t as quickly get you back to that middle place, that zone.

Now, on your website, I was looking at it a little bit and preparing for the call today. What is “the zone” that you talk about? [15:27]

Yeah, sure. Well, it’s most frequently used by athletes, and when athletes have a really good performance, like LeBron James scores 40 points and whatever, and you swim and you’re exceeding your record, they will often use the phrase, “Man, I was really in the zone.” And what they’re referring to is that middle part of the graph where stress is just right. That’s what they’re actually referring to, but when they talk about it, it sounds mystical. One of my teachers called it misty moisty. It sounds like, whoa, it just came on me. It’s not magical or mystical. It’s what you can affect by becoming aware when your stress is building and then using tools to get you back. So it’s actually a conscious process of awareness and tools. So the zone is that place of optimal performance, but it’s not magical.

Not magical, it’s not mystical. [16:42]

It’s not misty moisty.

And it’s one of the things that you do as performance psychology, psychologist rather, is help people get into that zone and maintain that zone? [16:48]

Yes, of course. That’s great. That’s the whole point of this work. 

Bear with me. I have to correct a couple of words. I don’t help people do anything. I train them to be aware when they’re slipping out of the zone and how to get themselves back using tools. Now, an important thing here to know is that everybody’s optimal level of stress is different. You have kids, you know what I’m talking about. My optimal level of stress is very different from my wife.

I can do four or five or six different things seemingly at once. My wife likes to do one thing at a time, and the worst thing we can do is look at another person and go, “What’s wrong with you? Why are you stressing out?” That’s terrible because that’s what’s going on with them. It’s different from us. So my work is about working with people so that they have a sense of what their optimal level of stress is and when they start to exceed that, how to get themselves back.

How does what you do relate to or complement traditional test prep? [18:05]

Well, it complements it. It relates to it and complements it. Traditional test prep, which has been around for quite a long time, really, the function of traditional test prep, and I think this is an accurate statement, is to very deeply familiarize yourself with the test you’re about to take. In other words, how is the test structured? What does it actually cover? How is the time allotted? What are the different elements of the test? So if it’s a multiple choice or short answers or essays. There are many things that you really need to know about the test structurally, but also content wise. On an ACT math test, there are six or seven, I think, domains of math that are tested. So you really need to know that’s what test prep traditionally does, which is training you to become familiar with the test itself, but also deeper dive into the content of the test.

What I do is give people performance tools so they can stay in that more zone state. So what does that actually mean? It means that they’re calm, they’re confident, and they’re focused, calm in the body, confident in the mind, and focused in the spirit. I get people, for years, I’ve gotten people who will do very well on practice tests, but then they take the actual test. I don’t say the real test because it’s all real. They take the actual test and then they tank, and that phenomenon fascinates me. How can you cross over a threshold and then be a different person, but that’s because they haven’t been trained in becoming more self-aware, they’re aware of the test, but not more self-aware and take that awareness into the performance itself. This is what good athletes do. They’re ready to really perform and we don’t teach performance tools. That’s what I do.

You mentioned the breathing exercise. What are some of your other top tools, if you don’t mind sharing? You don’t have to give them all, just a couple. [20:15]

No, I don’t mind sharing at all. I invented this model that puts them together, but it turns out there are nine tools, three for being calm, three for being confident, three for being focused. So the top three in each, I call them leg of the stool, think of a three-legged stool, the top one in staying calm has to be breathing. So I didn’t invent the tools, I invented the model. Breathing’s been around for a long time, and if you think about it, there’s a reason that thousands of years ago, the saints, the sages, the rishis, and rishi because in India and China were all talking about breathing then thousands of years ago.

Okay. So that’s one. In the mind, it’s very important that you immediately recognize when you’re saying something negative about yourself, and in the sense you confide that. You don’t try to push it down. I really don’t know what to do here, and there’s a way that I have to do. Unless you really accept that and admit that, you’re going to be fighting it, and for focus, the biggest tool for focus is to become aware when you’re getting distracted and stop your distraction. Just stop it in its tracks. An example from not testing would be I’m wanting to lose, which I am, another five or eight pounds and I am hungry and there’s an apple and there’s a donut. Okay. You get this picture here already?

I got it, I got it well. [21:53]

Thank you. So I go, distraction is donut, focus is apple. All right, good. You got that.

No problem, but I think distraction is a big issue today for people not even taking tests, just constantly staying focused is something I think we’re all challenged by without any tests involved. How can we enhance focus and minimize distraction even if we don’t have a donut staring at us and we’re trying to lose 10 pounds? [22:01]

Well, it’s such a good question. Let’s backtrack a little bit. Focus in the dictionary is a noun and a verb. The noun is the goal and the verb are the actions that take you to the goal. So the answer to your question is what is your goal? Be clear about your goal. If you want to minimize distraction, be clear about your goal, but also be clear that there are going to be actions that take you to the goal, apple, and actions that don’t take you to the goal, donut.

So it’s consistently becoming aware that you have this goal, but then when you come to a choice, that you make the appropriate choices. You’re totally right. Distraction is like the other pandemic that’s been going on and getting worse and worse and worse. So we have to stick to what we really want to achieve, what our intention is, and do that through our action. Really, that’s the only way, but there are other things too, I would say that contribute to that. Turn off your phone.

Turn off your notifications on your phone. [23:30]

Exactly. We don’t have a car. I ride a bicycle and we live in the Bay Area, and the other day, and I’m a pretty careful bicyclist, they have a lot of bike lanes. The other day, I was going across an intersection and somebody pulled around me to make a right turn, and this guy was looking at his phone while he was making a turn and he missed me by, I would say six inches.

So this is very dangerous stuff, really dangerous stuff. I have Zoom calls all the time and four to five times, the person’s always doing something else than talking to me and they think they look like they’re talking to me, but I have a huge antenna for this stuff and they’re doing something else. So now, I begin every call on this distraction note by just saying, look, I have a thing about people getting distracted while they’re talking to me. Could you please turn off all other devices, and most people are pretty cool with that.

You think that they’re also paying you, that you think they would want to get maximum value. [24:34]

Good point, Linda.

Are there different processes for performance enhancement when facing an academic test as opposed to life’s tests like public speaking, an interview, an artistic performance, or simply a difficult situation where you really have to step up to the plate and perform perhaps without the opportunity to prepare or study or do prep? [24:45]

Well, that last part of your question is really the hook, without preparation.

Well, then maybe there are two different questions. You can prepare for an interview, you can prepare for public speaking, but there are also tests that you don’t know are coming. [25:12]

Right. No. And also, even if you prepare for an interview or an examination, there will be things happening that you have not imagined necessarily, or you haven’t practiced. So the question is an excellent one. I don’t think it’s different processes as much as cultivating your awareness when your stress level is rising. So that would be different in different people. Stress level rising, you would feel that in the body, your pulse would increase. You might feel a little headache or stomach cramp or something like that. In the mind, you would be starting to say something negative to yourself. Somebody throws you a question. I had a client this morning and she was talking about an experience where she was teaching the class and somebody threw her a question and she got nervous.

So what does that mean? Well, she had physical symptoms, but she was telling herself as the person finished the question, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to answer this. So what I told her, which is, again, awareness, when she became aware that she was saying that, just to take a moment to pause, to ground herself, and let herself come back into a state where she could answer the question. So it always comes down to being calm, confident, focused. Why? Because it’s always body, mind, and spirit. So you need to know when you’re feeling that kind of stress yourself, you need to say I’m disconnected, body, mind, spirit, and you can start anywhere. Think of a three-legged stool. The three legs are dynamically connected. If you move one, it’s going to affect the other two. So I think the question is really great because we’re always faced with tests all day long.

That’s right. We really are, constantly, constant. [27:10]

Constant. Yeah. I’m just thinking on a much more mundane level, your child runs in the room and goes, “Daddy, daddy, daddy,” and you go, “Calm down.” Well, that’s not helping anybody.

Well, generally telling somebody who’s excited to calm down doesn’t do any good. [27:29]

No, of course not, but what people don’t realize is they just got induced into that other person’s state. The kid at this point is all worked up. You can be so helpful if you calm down and then can deal with whatever his issue is, but often, people just get swept right into other people’s stress, which is really problematic.

I sometimes have told some of my grandkids that are upset about something and screaming or yelling or crying I say, “I can’t hear you. You’re talking too loud.” That usually calms them down. [27:53]

Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, you’re a good grandma. That’s good.

What tips do you have, and I think we’ve touched on this already really, but I’ll ask it again so you can review, for, let’s say, reducing tension when actually, we were talking a little bit about prep or not being able to prep, but when you’re in a situation and you’re in the interview chair and you get a question that throws you for a loop, again, is it just take a minute to think mind, body, spirit and I’m going to do the best I can? [28:10]

Well, yes. Let’s see. Let me think about this for one second.

You’re in an interview chair or a test chair, and you get a question that throws you for a loop. You don’t know how to answer it. [28:45]

Well, I think it’s perfectly fine to, and this comes from years of coaching people to take oral exams, for instance, or interviews. It’s perfectly fine to say I need a moment to think about this. You only feel pressured to answer quickly because of habit, experience, expectation, or you’re imagining that you’re going to not seem smart if you have to take some time to think of it. It’s perfectly fine to think about something. It’s also perfectly fine to say at the first instance, I don’t have an immediate answer for that. I need to think about it a little bit.

But in order to think about it, you do have to calm yourself down because if you’re not calm, you’re going to be thinking about how nervous you are so you won’t have room to think about it, but there’s another part to your question, which I would like to say and suggest. I think it’s very helpful to do what athletes almost always do before a competition. They imagine it. They go through it in a guided imagery way. They see it from start to finish. They see themselves performing at their best, they see themselves overcoming obstacles, they see themselves dealing with the challenge.

Now, what does that do? That actually does a whole bunch of things, which is there’s a whole bunch of muscle memory things that are going on, but it also is if you can do it in your imagination, chances are you can do it on the outside too. If you think about it, everything that we see or touch, not in the plant world, but in the physical world, other physical worlds are created first in somebody’s imagination. This microphone I’m sitting in front of, my desk, where you are, it all started in the imagination. So why not apply that to our own lives where we imagine something before? A good example of this on a very literal level is when you see a phone call come in because the caller ID and you think, ugh, ugh, God, this person, stressful.

I don’t want to talk to that person. [31:10]

Yeah, don’t pick up the phone immediately. Exhale, ground yourself. Just come back to a state of openness, readiness to deal with what you have to deal with, and if you’re not ready, just don’t answer. Let it go to voicemail because you’ll avoid an unpleasant experience.

Good advice, especially for the unpleasant call. Either deal with it, take a deep breath and deal with it, or postpone it. You don’t have to deal with it. [31:22]

My wife helped me a lot with emails because I would get an email and then I have to answer it, and I got myself in some hot water with that because either my answer was too short or it wasn’t considerate or whatever, and she helped me a lot with that, which is like, okay, write out an answer, but don’t hit send. Just write out an answer and come back to it. Is that really what I want to say? Am I saying it in the best way possible? We feel so rushed in our culture to be just, we have to do it now, and have to be perfect. All of this has to, has to, and it’s not really how we work as human beings.

Well, email in particular is a very cold medium. [32:15]

Yes, exactly. Definitely. Yeah.

It’s very useful, but it can be very cold. [32:21]

Cold is very good. I never heard it described as a cold medium. That’s an excellent adjective.

Thank you. What would you have liked me to ask you that I haven’t asked you? [32:29]

What would I have liked? Well, it’s more like what I would like to say. So if I can turn around that way. I do what I do because we’re not trained in our educational system to do things in a calm and confident and focused way. Our educational system in general, and I’m not talking about particular schools and particular teachers. I’m talking about the system, is run like an assembly line, which is how it was created in the industrial revolution. You do this, you do this, you do this, you do this, and you pop out with a degree and then you get a job, and that does not create the environment for real learning, for real growth, for retention, for all of those things.

And so when people come to me and say, “I want to get a 1550 on my SAT or a 36 on ACT, or I want to get the highest score on my LSAT or whatever,” I say to them, “Look, I want that for you too and I really want to work with you so that you can get into that score level, but the reason I’m doing this work is because you should have learned this stuff in the second grade because these are life tools, how to be calm and confident,” to folks. You said this before, we’re faced with life, challenges, tests every single day and we don’t teach in our educational system, truly, we don’t really teach what’s useful for life. We teach a whole bunch of other things, and my shorthand, smartest way of saying this, how much do you remember from the fourth grade? Almost nothing, and it goes on and on like that.

And I really do think there’s a failing that we have to correct. I have the great good fortune to have been trained as a teacher in extremely progressive, wonderful schools in England that were in very poor neighborhoods, but the kids loved to come to school. Why? Because they were being cultivated as individuals, as creative people, as part of a community. It was more lifelike than anything I had experienced as a kid. So that’s what I really want to say, which is that we need to be learning life tools and then when we’re faced with any test, we can deal with it in a good way, and I really appreciate how you’re bringing all the different tests in because we are faced with tests all the time. So thank you for allowing me to ask the question that I wanted to answer.

You’re very welcome. I like a quote my daughter’s friend once said, and I later heard it was a Tom Bodett quote, that in school, you have lessons and take tests. In life, you have tests and learn lessons. [35:20]

Oh my goodness, that, wow. Please put that in your website or the chat or something. I really got to remember that one. That’s great.

Where can listeners learn more about your work if they’re interested in performance enhancement on test day or in other situations in life? Where can they learn about you and your work? [35:51]

The best place is my website. Now, when we go to the website, there are all kinds of resources, and one of them, if you have tests issues, would be a course called Crush Your Test Anxiety. So you look in the menu for courses, but there’s all kinds of other resources there, links to my blog on Psychology Today, and then I also want to just say I’m happy if somebody wants to consult with me. You get on my calendar, we have a 20-minute consultation. I get to ask you a lot of questions and tell you about how I work and see if there’s a fit for working together.

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