Testophobia: Understanding the Fear of Academic Failure

802 Words2 Pages

Test Anxiety: The Crippling Fear of Failure Fear is used as the umbrella term for a seemingly innumerable amount of emotions and traits, namely because fear presents itself in a number of ways. If you have ever experienced any anxiety or phobia then you have encountered something that you are afraid of and that feeling was produced by fear. The purpose of this essay is to introduce the reader to a specific kind of terror, and that is “testophobia” or test anxiety that can be brought on by an apprehension of failure. The small tremors traveling through her limbs were the only outwardly signs of her impending doom, a result of her anxiousness being fed upon by her own mind. A gremlin of sorts that had kept her awake the night before, and now …show more content…

Always stuck in the past and dreading the future she struggled to grasp her own understanding of what she could do to save herself. Now that she was drowning in her own fear she didn’t think that she could possible find a way out. Pause, take a breath and breathe. She looked up, making eye contact with her professor just in time to hear her say that the midterm wasn’t until the next class and that today she would help them prepare. The girl’s heart sunk and flopped down to the pit of her stomach, but she could breathe again. Fear released the vice like grip it had on her mind long enough for her brain to instruct her lungs to fill with air and exhale. The windfalls were calming her down and she could no longer see red. This whole time she was in the throes of her anxiety for nothing at all. The test wasn’t for days and she still had time to prepare. But days from now her body knew that it would be back in the familiar territory of the yellow bile filled land of distress. It was literally only a matter of hours before she would once again be crippled by her own fear of

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