 During the week of your exam, your nerves, anxiety, and cortisol levels are all likely increasing, and too much can be in poor sleep, focus, and attention, ultimately leading you to a poor grade. And like most students, that's just a level of stress on the days leading up to the big exam. But if you walk into test day with excessive anxiety, you're likely going to battle with second guessing, being forgetful, and being on your way to a disappointing grade. Any of that sounds familiar, it's because I was literally in your shoes when I was taking tests at medical school, and here are the few ways I was able to overcome it, and ultimately get a 3.9 GPA. Let's break it down. Hey friends, welcome back to channel. Today we're going to break down the 5 phases and important keys you can use to be more calm during exams, first is going to be threshold training. Now anxiety and stress are not necessarily something you need to get rid of completely, it's just another element that you need to get accustomed to. Using running as an example as I just finished another marathon, runners will train at something called a lactate threshold. This basically teaches their bodies to get used to this level of discomfort and adapt to that building of lactic acid, and over time their tolerance to this threshold improves. And so one of my favorite ways to incorporate threshold training into school that I loved using in medical school that we recommend to a lot of our students is to doing practice questions without the feedback. Now most students are accustomed to using practice questions very traditional way, which is to do the questions, see if you got it right or wrong, read the explanation, move to the next one. That doesn't really help your confidence level if you can't see the answer. So threshold training using practice questions is basically doing a random block of questions, maybe 5 to 10 at a time if you're struggling and not knowing if you got it right or wrong. And just like running instead of your lactate, you'll find that your anxiety starts to peak at a different amount of questions of uncertainty of whether you got it right or wrong. For me, it may be doing 10 questions in a row and not sure how many of those I got correct. For you, it may be five or 15. Do that amount, set those sessions up and try to do it with the timer as if it was a real thing and without the necessarily confidence that you got it right or wrong. And then after you're done answering questions and you hit submit, look at the questions to obviously see if you got it right or wrong, but also try to evaluate did I get any of them wrong because of high anxiety or just being a little bit careless with my time because I was pressed to go to the next question. That is a good indicator that you're at your threshold training for test taking. Maybe you did 10 questions and you found that your performance on three to four of them was because of anxiety or stress. Perfect. Set that to be your standard of questions that you do the next time. If you found that you did 10 questions and really none of them are impacted by anxiety or stress, increase that threshold next time so then you're more prepared to show the exam day. Number two is stress minimizers. Now, during the day of the test, there's many things that you can do to feel in control of a test that one you didn't make and for a grade that you only can control the input for. And so one of the many things you can do is to have a routine into the exam. So when you're doing your threshold training, for example, try to do those sessions at the same time that your exam would be. Maybe it's an early morning session. Maybe you have an afternoon exam or lap. Try to set up your entire environment that's going to mimic the time of the day, how fatigued or alert you're going to be, that way you're ready to take that exam. In addition to the time of the day, you also want to keep account for things like your food intake or the food or the meal that you're going to have before the exam, as well as the amount of sleep you're getting and obviously your caffeine intake. I specifically remember those exams where I had one and a half sugar-free monsters thinking that would keep me alert only to find that I was jittery during the exam. And I wasn't sure if it's because of anxiety of them being sure about a question or just the caffeine taking a hold. But with each quiz and each test, you can ask yourself, did this element make me feel more relaxed or more nervous? So less caffeine for me, more music that's instrumental, motivational was definitely the way to go going into an exam. Now, when you take a test and you have 10 questions, there's really two ways that students look at it. One, they come across question, they have no idea how to answer, and immediately they start to avalanche into a student that goes from an A to a C because they're just worried about how many points are going to lose. But on the flip side, you can look at every question of saying, I'm going to assume there's going to be some hard questions on this quiz or test, that's natural. But if I see a question that I just know the answer to, beautiful, I got that point. If I go to the next one and I don't feel as confident, I'm going to actually internally tell myself, you probably are going to get this wrong. Go ahead and guess, and that's actually going to be a point extra if you have managed to get it right. And if not, you've already accounted for the miss. And I keep doing this because I never let one hard question lead me to miss future questions. But if I get a question right, it often leads me to build momentum to answer other questions with confidence. And finally, the third point into this section is to always have a post-test victory. If you put in the hard work of setting for material that was difficult, regardless of how the test went, you want to make sure that you go out with the mentality of not feeling, ah, thank God, it's over. Instead of saying, I've worked freaking hard for this, we'll see what the results are, but I've rewarded myself with a hangout with my friends, a movie, just chilling out and napping. But you want to make sure that you congratulate yourself for the hard work that you put into the exam instead of just stressing about the results, because now again, it's not in your control. Now phase three or tip three that I just absolutely love is called a repetition checklist. Now in reality, prepping for an exam is just basically an avalanche of lack of confidence. And then test day comes around and you're like, oh, but imagine on the flip side of every single day going into exam, you're like, I actually feel better for this test than I did a week, week and a half ago. Now ideally, all of you guys are raising your hands like, yes, I would absolutely love that, please teach me how. That means you're gonna have to have a daily and a weekly system that helps build that confidence over time. The repetition checklist is one of my favorite ways of doing this. And basically the way it works is you create any type of document, it could be both physical or digital, I love using a word document back in college, I use other tools like Evernote or Notion in medical school, but basically every single lecture, you want to come up with a list of essentially your hit list for that lecture. This can be specific concepts, medications, phrases, relationships, tables, formulas, whatever it may be that you feel like I need to master. This may also include learning objectives if your professor or your lecturer includes them, but it's basically a big consensus list that if you mastered everything in that list and felt comfortable that you could teach it, you're probably gonna do well for that specific lecture. And you continue to do this for every single testable material, every lecture, every lab, whatever comes up for that quiz or exam. Now ideally, you're doing this close enough to the time that you first are introduced to the material, so you're not having to play catch up later on, trying to create this list. But once you have this list on a daily basis, you can go through whatever your review system is. So again, for me, it was always flashcards. If you guys are interested, I'll link down below in my favorite videos on how to use Anki because it just was a life saver for me in medical school. But I would do my flashcard system and then I would look at my checklist and say, okay, from this list of 18 topics from lecture one, I feel comfortable about 12 of them. I would color code those green. And anything that I felt were the hardest topics, I would make them red or orange. And then on the next day, I would go back to the list and look at all the reds and saying, which of these topics do I feel more comfortable with after I've given myself a day to just absorb and understand them, or which of them do I need to go back and watch a quick five to 10 minute video on? And that's just phase one. A lot of our coaching students know that we use our weekends not to play catch up, but instead to do your second review of all your material. If you guys are interested in what it looks like to work with us, I'll link down below a free step by step video on exactly where our process is. But on the weekends, when I was in medical school, I would basically go back to my lectures. About half of them on Saturday, the other half on Sunday. And I would come back to this list and I would start with the red topics first. Instead of going through my flashcards and my notes and doing the easy topics, I would purposely go to the red ones first, because now I know that the hardest topics are feeling more comfortable over time. And I would basically just repeat this until the quiz or test. Now there's a lots of little nuances that you can do to help further optimize how you use a repetition checklist. If you guys again are interested, you can either choose to work with us and join the Medelite Academy or the level up your studying program all include little step by steps on how to do this. But the basic takeaway is if you have a document and outline of all the things you need to know and majority of them are green, going into test day, you'll walk in with confidence and thus be able to stay calm during the actual exam. Now principle number four is to have a test maker approach. Now most students will look at any topic and say, oh man, I have to learn all of this. But in reality, if you just focus on who's teaching you, you can actually start to see what type of questions would I start asking if I was the person that's making the test. And so not only will that turn into better notes or focus questions that you can ask on your flashcards, but when you're actually taking the test, you can use something that's very simple called my question answer step method to help answer questions and avoid those pitfalls and traps that a lot of your lecturers will set out for you. And the basic principle of how this works is you first will read the question and just get an idea of what they're asking you for. Number two is you're gonna go to the answer choices just to see where your options are because now you kind of already have an idea of what frameworks and things you're going to be looking for in the actual step of the question because now for example, if they're asking me what's the diagnosis and they give me four of them, I'm basically going to ask myself, well, what do I need to know to diagnose A, B, C and D? And I'm gonna specifically now go back to this big vignette, this big paragraph or small one and look for the pieces of details that actually fits. Instead of looking at my details and asking myself which ones fit the best answer choice because there's obviously gonna be traps there if I work backwards, you tend to think like the person who's making the test who tends to say, I want them to make sure they know the answer here. And thus I'm going to put in enough details where that's gonna be the best one. And then finally, phase five or principle five is gap learning. Now this is what I personally started calling the brain dump early in college and it really just saved my life, every single class that I've taken that I found to be difficult. But basically, if you can actively test yourself and identify that by the way bro, you suck at this topic earlier on in your quiz or test prep versus actually on the test, you are set up for success. So imagine if you did this for every single lecture where you identified all your gaps and over time filled those in, you can imagine you're gonna go into test A, much more calm, much more ready to actually go crush it. Very simple way of how you use the brain dump is you can use, for example, your repetition checklist, give a blank piece of paper and saying, okay, Lux, go ahead and teach this on a piece of paper. Go ahead and put the lecture that you just reviewed on the whiteboard and identify where you just feel uncomfortable writing things down. Because we're very good at BSing ourselves and saying, I know that, but as soon as you have to speak it out loud, draw it out, put it on the whiteboard, you can visibly or audibly see, I actually don't know it. And that is what we call a gap. So for me, a brain dump is a quick five minute session of just putting the entire lecture and the flow of the lecture, all the bullet points, doesn't have to be full hand. I'm just trying to get an idea of where my gaps are. Once I have them, I'm marking them with a star or underlining them. And now I go back to the lecture, filling those gaps and saying, oh, that was a third bullet point. Perfect, write it on the whiteboard, erase the whiteboard, erase the piece of paper, flip it back over, do it again. Now you're filling the gaps. And if you do this on a daily basis, definitely on the weekends and multiple times before your quiz and test, again, confidence, the skyrockets, your calmness will remain steady and the anxiety that you'll feel that there's going to be something on the test that's gonna trip you up is definitely gonna decrease. Now these are just a few of the tips that I have to help you study better and definitely do better on your exam. If you want the 40 plus tips that I'm adding to on a weekly basis to help you on your medical journey, the Med School Success Fan Book is just like honestly downloaded by thousands of students so far in the past year. Hopefully you guys enjoy them as well. I'll link that down below. If you guys are interested in what three steps that we take every single student to be able to get you better grades in just a short amount of time, click down below to get that free three-minute video. And if you enjoy this episode, then you'll definitely enjoy this one on my entire system that I use to ace every exam in medical school to get that 3.9 GPA, as well as this one right here on my entire time management system that I use as a student. Go ahead and enjoy these. As always, my friends, hopefully you enjoyed today's episode. Thank you for being part of my journey. Hopefully I was just a little helped to you guys on yours and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.