Every time you think about test day, your stomach tightens. You imagine sitting down at that computer terminal. You picture yourself freezing on a question. You wonder what happens if your mind just goes blank.
Welcome to test anxiety. If you're experiencing it, you're in good company—most social workers preparing for the ASWB report some level of anxiety about the exam. And here's the thing nobody tells you: You're not supposed to eliminate that anxiety. You're supposed to work with it.
That's not what most test prep advice will tell you. You'll read articles about "conquering test anxiety" or "eliminating exam stress." They'll give you breathing exercises and positive affirmations and tell you to visualize success. Some of that might help. But the underlying message—that anxiety is the enemy and needs to be defeated—actually makes things worse.
Because here's what anxiety is really doing: It's telling you this matters. It's mobilizing your resources. It's sharpening your focus. The goal isn't to feel completely calm and relaxed on test day. The goal is to channel that activation into performance.
Think about it from a clinical perspective for a moment. When a client comes to you with anxiety, do you tell them to just relax? Of course not. You help them understand what the anxiety is about, you work with the physiological response, you build skills for managing it. You don't tell them to make it disappear.
The same principle applies here. Test anxiety exists for a reason. You're about to sit for an exam that affects your career trajectory. Your nervous system is responding appropriately to a high-stakes situation. Trying to force yourself to be calm is like telling yourself not to think about a white bear—it backfires.
What actually works is reframing your relationship with the anxiety. Instead of "I need to get rid of this feeling," try "I can have this feeling and still perform well." Instead of "My anxiety means I'm not ready," try "My anxiety means this matters to me." That shift from fighting the anxiety to working alongside it changes everything.
You already know this from your clinical training. Acceptance-based approaches work better than avoidance. Mindfulness beats suppression. You're not trying to eliminate the discomfort—you're changing how you relate to it.
Not all anxiety is created equal. There's a version of test anxiety that actually helps you, and a version that actively undermines your performance. Learning to distinguish between them is key.
Productive anxiety shows up as motivation to prepare. It gets you to schedule that practice test. It keeps you working through questions even when you'd rather be doing something else. It helps you identify weak areas and address them. It creates focus and urgency. This version of anxiety is your ally.
Unproductive anxiety shows up as rumination. It's the 2 AM spiral where you're convinced you'll fail, you'll never get licensed, your career is over. It's the constant second-guessing during practice tests where you change correct answers to incorrect ones. It's the avoidance that masquerades as studying—you're reading and re-reading notes but not actually testing yourself because testing yourself provokes too much anxiety.
Here's how to tell which one you're experiencing: Productive anxiety moves you toward the exam. It increases preparation behavior. Unproductive anxiety moves you away from the exam. It increases avoidance behavior.
If your anxiety is telling you to take another practice test, that's productive. If it's telling you that practice tests don't matter because you'll fail anyway, that's unproductive. If it's motivating you to review an area where you're weak, that's productive. If it's convincing you that you're weak in every area so why bother, that's unproductive.
The goal isn't to eliminate all anxiety—it's to cultivate the productive version and interrupt the unproductive version.
Let's talk about the physical experience of test anxiety because understanding what's happening in your body helps you work with it instead of against it.
Your heart rate increases. Your breathing gets shallow. Your muscles tense. You might feel nauseous or like you need to use the bathroom. Your hands might shake. You might sweat. These are all completely normal physiological responses to perceived threat.
Your sympathetic nervous system doesn't distinguish between "I'm being chased by a bear" and "I'm taking an important exam." It just knows that something high-stakes is happening, and it's preparing you to deal with it. That preparation involves flooding your system with stress hormones and redirecting blood flow to your large muscle groups.
This is where the standard advice about deep breathing comes in, and it's not wrong—controlled breathing does activate your parasympathetic nervous system and can help modulate the stress response. But here's what nobody tells you: You don't need to make all those physical sensations go away. You just need to prevent them from escalating.
Think of it like a dimmer switch instead of an on/off switch. You're not trying to go from full activation to complete calm. You're just trying to bring the activation down to a manageable level where you can still think clearly.
Some physical activation is actually helpful. It keeps you alert. It maintains focus. Research on performance shows that moderate arousal is optimal—too little and you're sluggish, too much and you're scattered. You want to be in the middle range.
So when you notice your heart racing on test day, instead of panicking about the panic, you can recognize it as your body mobilizing resources. The goal is to keep it from running away with itself, not to achieve perfect physical calm.
Here's something you already know from treating anxiety clinically: Avoidance maintains it. Exposure reduces it. The same principle applies to test anxiety.
Every practice test you take is an exposure exercise. You're creating a situation that mimics the anxiety-provoking stimulus (sitting down to answer ASWB-style questions under timed conditions), and you're learning that you can tolerate it. More than tolerate it—you can function in it.
The first practice test most people take produces significant anxiety. Your heart races. You second-guess yourself. You feel overwhelmed by the 170-question format. You're sure you're failing. This is normal. This is the exposure working.
By the third or fourth practice test, something interesting happens. The format feels familiar. You know what to expect. You've learned to pace yourself. The anxiety is still there, but it's not consuming your entire mental bandwidth. You've habituated to the stimulus.
This is why taking one practice test isn't enough. You need repeated exposure to build tolerance. You need to learn through experience—not just intellectually—that you can sit for a multi-hour exam and perform adequately even when you're anxious.
And here's the other thing exposure does: It helps you separate anxiety from actual preparedness. When you're anxious during studying, you might think "I'm anxious because I'm not ready." When you take a practice test, you get objective data. Maybe you're anxious and you scored well—that tells you the anxiety isn't an accurate gauge of your knowledge. Or maybe you're anxious and you scored poorly, but now you have specific feedback about where to focus. Either way, you've converted vague worry into concrete information.
The exposure principle is also why waiting until the week before your exam to take your first practice test isn't ideal. You need time to habituate, time to learn that the anxiety peaks and then subsides, time to build confidence through repeated experience. Start early. Take multiple tests. Let the exposure do its work.
Let's get practical. It's the night before your exam. What should you actually do with the anxiety that's probably running high?
First, don't study. This is hard for anxious brains because studying feels productive, and when you're anxious you want to do something. But cramming the night before doesn't improve retention—it just increases anxiety. At this point, your knowledge base is what it is. Trust that you've done the preparation work.
Do something that genuinely relaxes you, and "relax" doesn't mean watching Netflix if Netflix doesn't actually help you unwind. For some people, it's a workout. For others, it's dinner with a friend. For others, it's reading fiction or listening to music. The goal is to occupy your mind with something engaging enough that you're not spiraling, but low-stakes enough that it's not adding stress.
Avoid alcohol. I know, some people swear by a glass of wine to calm pre-exam nerves. The problem is that alcohol disrupts sleep architecture, and good sleep is one of the few things that genuinely improves test performance. You're better off anxious with good sleep than slightly less anxious with fragmented sleep.
Speaking of sleep: You probably won't sleep great the night before the exam. That's okay. One night of suboptimal sleep doesn't significantly impact cognitive performance. What does impact performance is lying in bed for hours getting increasingly anxious about not sleeping. If you're not asleep within 30 minutes, get up and do something low-key until you feel tired.
Prepare your logistics the night before. Know exactly where your test center is. Have your ID ready. Know your route and how long it takes. This is using your anxious energy productively—you're addressing concrete variables you can control.
And here's something that might sound counterintuitive: Don't try to convince yourself you won't be anxious tomorrow. You probably will be. That's fine. Remind yourself that anxiety is compatible with good performance, that you've practiced working with it, that it doesn't mean anything is wrong.
Test-day morning is about building positive momentum and maintaining a sense of control. Start with the basics: Eat something, even if your stomach feels unsettled. You need fuel. Choose something with protein and complex carbs that will sustain you—this isn't the morning for experimentation with new foods.
Give yourself more time than you think you need to get to the test center. Rushing creates additional activation on top of the baseline anxiety you're already managing. Arriving 30 minutes early is better than arriving 5 minutes early and having your heart rate spiked from the rush.
In the car or on the way there, resist the urge to quiz yourself or do last-minute review. You're not building knowledge at this point—you're managing your nervous system. Listen to music you find energizing or calming (whichever you need more). Some people like complete silence. Do what works for you.
When you arrive at the test center, expect that check-in might feel chaotic. There might be other anxious test-takers around you. There might be delays. There might be procedures that feel tedious. All of this is normal. It's part of the stimulus you're habituating to.
Once you're at the computer for the tutorial, use those few minutes before the exam timer starts to ground yourself. Take a few deep breaths. Remind yourself that you've done this before (in practice tests), that you know the format, that you have strategies for working with the anxiety.
Some people find it helpful to have a brief grounding phrase they repeat. Not an affirmation about how great they're going to do—something realistic like "I can do this scared" or "One question at a time." You're not trying to eliminate the fear. You're just reminding yourself that it doesn't have to stop you.
The exam has started. Your anxiety is probably elevated. Here's how to work with it question by question.
First, accept that your anxiety will fluctuate. Some questions will feel manageable and your anxiety will decrease. Some questions will feel impossible and your anxiety will spike. This is normal. You're not supposed to maintain perfect emotional equilibrium for four hours. You're just supposed to keep moving forward.
When anxiety spikes on a particular question, you have a choice. You can keep wrestling with that question while your anxiety escalates, or you can flag it and move on. Remember that the exam lets you return to flagged questions. There's no reward for suffering through anxiety-producing questions in sequence. If a question is making you anxious and you're stuck, mark it and come back to it. Often when you return to it later, your anxiety will have decreased and the answer will be clearer.
Watch for the spiral. This is when you miss a question (or think you've missed a question), and that triggers anxiety, which makes the next question harder, which increases the anxiety, which affects the next question. When you notice this happening, interrupt it. Take a deliberate breath. Remind yourself that you can miss questions and still pass. Reset before moving forward.
Use the scratch pad strategically. Writing down key information from a vignette can help externalize it so your anxious brain doesn't have to keep cycling through it. This is especially helpful when anxiety is making your working memory feel unreliable.
If you finish a section early, take your break even if you don't think you need it. The anxiety tends to be cumulative across the exam. Giving yourself a mental reset between sections helps prevent that accumulation from overwhelming your capacity.
At some point during the exam, many people have the thought "I'm failing this." The anxiety spikes. The catastrophic thinking kicks in. You start imagining having to retake it, what you'll tell people, how you'll explain the failure.
Here's what you need to know: That thought doesn't mean anything. Feeling like you're failing isn't the same as actually failing. Your anxious brain is catastrophizing, which is what anxious brains do. It's not giving you accurate information about your performance.
In fact, research on test performance shows that many people who pass report feeling during the exam like they were failing. The exam is designed to be challenging. You're not supposed to feel like you're breezing through it. If you feel uncertain about many questions, that's not a sign of failure—it's a sign that the exam is appropriately difficult.
When this thought comes up, acknowledge it ("I'm having the thought that I'm failing") and then redirect to what you can control right now (the question in front of you). You can worry about your overall performance after the exam. Right now, your job is just to keep making your best guess on each question.
This is where having taken practice tests really pays off. You've had the experience of feeling like you were doing poorly on a practice test and then seeing your score. You know that your emotional experience during the test doesn't accurately predict your performance. That knowledge helps you maintain some skepticism about the catastrophic thoughts.
You've submitted the last section. You're waiting for the computer to calculate your result. This is often when anxiety peaks because you've lost the distraction of answering questions and now you're just waiting for the outcome.
Remember that most people pass the ASWB on their first attempt. The exam is designed to measure minimum competence for entry-level practice—it's not designed to fail large numbers of candidates. You've prepared, you've practiced, you've made it through. The odds are genuinely in your favor.
If you pass, the relief will be immediate and enormous. If you don't pass, it's disappointing but it's not catastrophic. You can retake the exam. You'll have diagnostic information about where to focus. Many successful social workers have retaken licensing exams. It doesn't define your career or your competence.
Once you have your result and you've left the test center, resist the urge to do post-mortem analysis. Don't try to remember specific questions. Don't compare your experience with others who tested. You can't change your performance at this point, and ruminating about it just extends the anxiety.
If you passed, celebrate. Really let yourself feel the relief and accomplishment. You worked hard for this.
If you didn't pass, let yourself feel disappointed, then shift into problem-solving mode. Use the diagnostic information from your score report. Consider what you need to do differently in your preparation. Remember that many competent social workers have been exactly where you are now and have gone on to pass and build successful careers.
The single most effective thing you can do to manage test-day anxiety is to build tolerance through repeated practice. Not just content review. Not just reading questions. Actual timed practice tests that simulate the full exam experience.
Each practice test you take is teaching your nervous system that this is survivable. You sit down, you feel the anxiety, you work through 170 questions, you make it to the end. You learn viscerally—not just intellectually—that you can do this while anxious.
You also learn what your particular anxiety patterns are. Maybe you catastrophize early in the exam but then settle down. Maybe you do fine until you hit an especially difficult question and then spiral. Maybe your anxiety increases in the second half when you're tired. Knowing your patterns helps you prepare strategies for them.
Practice tests also help you distinguish between anxiety and actual knowledge gaps. When you're anxious during content review, you might think everything feels uncertain. When you take a practice test, you get objective data. You might discover that you're anxious but you're actually answering questions correctly. Or you might discover specific content areas where you genuinely need more preparation. Either way, you're replacing vague worry with concrete information.
The other thing practice tests do is build your sense of self-efficacy. Each test you complete successfully is evidence that you can do this. You're not relying on positive thinking or affirmations—you have actual data that you can perform well even when anxious. That evidence is much more powerful than any amount of cognitive reframing.
Let's talk about common anxiety management strategies that sound good but don't actually help much with test anxiety specifically.
Positive affirmations about how great you're going to do tend to backfire when you don't believe them. Your anxious brain knows you can't guarantee you'll pass, and trying to convince yourself otherwise just creates cognitive dissonance.
Visualizing yourself succeeding might help some people, but for many it just creates more performance pressure. You're not trying to achieve perfection—you're trying to demonstrate minimum competence while managing anxiety.
Trying to eliminate all anxiety-producing thoughts through distraction or suppression doesn't work. Those thoughts come back stronger. You're better off acknowledging them and redirecting to what you can control.
Comparing yourself to others who seemed calm and confident during preparation doesn't help. You don't know what they were experiencing internally, and their anxiety level doesn't determine yours.
Cramming the week before the exam might reduce anxiety temporarily because it feels productive, but it's not an effective learning strategy and it increases your overall stress load.
What does help is practicing under realistic conditions, building skill confidence through repeated exposure, taking care of basic physiological needs (sleep, food, exercise), and accepting that some anxiety is normal and manageable.
If there's one thing I want you to take from this, it's that test anxiety is a normal response to a high-stakes situation. You're not defective for experiencing it. You don't need to achieve perfect calm to perform well. You just need to prevent the anxiety from escalating to the point where it genuinely interferes with your ability to think.
The social workers who pass the ASWB aren't the ones who feel no anxiety—they're the ones who've learned to work with their anxiety instead of fighting it. They've practiced enough that the exam format feels familiar. They've developed strategies for managing anxiety spikes during the test. They've learned to separate anxious thoughts from actual data about their preparedness.
You can develop these same skills. Take practice tests under realistic conditions. Notice your anxiety patterns. Build tolerance through exposure. Take care of your basic needs. Trust your preparation.
The anxiety you're feeling isn't evidence that you're not ready. It's evidence that you care about this, that it matters to you, that you're taking it seriously. Work with that energy instead of fighting it, and you'll find it can actually help carry you through test day.
Ready to build that anxiety tolerance through practice? Take a full-length practice test and notice what happens with your anxiety during it. Where does it spike? Where does it decrease? What helps you refocus when it escalates? That information is worth its weight in gold come test day.
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