My last period of exams I experienced as being a 'rough patch' and I experienced a lot of stress/anxiety in relation to the exams not being able to remember all the information. I thought this was really weird considering that throughout highschool I never had any problems like this in terms of really being 'freaked out'. I mean, I would have some anxiety/nervousness but I knew that I could trust that in the moment that I am faced with the exam, I can 'conjure up' the information by reading the question and I also made a habit out of not looking at the information just before the exam but just trust myself that I'd be able to access the information I needed during the exam.
Then I remembered this one memory of something that happened during one of my last exams in highschool. Me and my class were standing infront of the classroom where our exam was going to be, and this one girl which everyone considered to be quite intelligent was busy regurgitating information from the subject -- completely verbatim from our textbook. At first I was just impressed like 'Woaw, she actually learnt all of that by heart?". But then I saw my other classmates panicking because they weren't able to re-produce the information as perfect as she was doing it -- and within that moment I checked whether I could re-produce it like that... and I couldn't! Then I quickly 5 min before the exam (which was against my rules lol) I would try and memorise the information, try and hold on to it real bad and then the moment we got our exam papers quickly write it down before the information would disappear.
What I realised is that since that happened, I changed my studying method where I used to simply read and trust myself -- to reading from a starting point of fear as the fear of not being able to remember/re-produce the information. So as I am reading I am just going 'fear, fear, fear' -- and so not really taking in / allowing myself to understand the information because I am already fearing losing the information that I do not even get to taking it in, in the first place! Lol
Somewhere by the end of our last exam period I had gotten to a point where I simply 'gave up' on trying to memorize all the information, because it was simple 'too much' in terms of the amount of information that I would have to memorise and the amount of time I had available until the exam -- so I decided that it was just not worth it because I found it very strenuous and I wasn't going to be able to cover all the information. So then I simply read the information and was actually calm within 'having given up' and realising that there wasn't anything more that I could do -- and then this time I was actually able to process the information effectively and work with it well during the exam!
So now I have to 'walk back' in time and get back to how I used to trust myself within studying and get this fear out of the way.
Self Forgiveness and Self Corrective Statements to Follow
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