Managing Your GMAT Prep Stress: Anticipation

Life after college isn’t easy. That’s why this week and next we’ll be focusing in on some tips for alleviating and managing your GMAT prep stress.

If you’re like most prospective business school students, some of these common sources of stress probably sound familiar:

• Paying off student loans
• Trying to secure a job that’ll impress your parents
• Networking with professionals in your field
• Making time to keep in touch with old friends
• Navigating the precarious world of online dating

You get the idea. On top of all that, admissions officers and MBA bloggers keep talking about how important a solid GMAT score is for successful applications. Great, one more thing to worry about.

The benefits of stress management

Don’t get too anxious just yet—stress can actually be a good thing. Stress produces adrenaline, which can help increase concentration and focus your mind on important goals. On the other hand, adrenaline can also cause sweaty palms, nervous ticks, and nausea. Inevitably, you’re going to feel stressed and experience a surge of adrenaline by the time Test Day rolls around. The key is learning to control and channel that pressure to increase your GMAT score.

Stress management needs to be a part of your GMAT prep strategy. Get proactive and think about how to manage your stress early on—before you’re feeling inundated by anxiety. There are two ways to think about stress management:

• Pre-test stress (anticipation), and
• Test Day stress (performance)

Let’s look at the first of these two stress drivers…

Dealing with anticipation stress

When you pull out your GMAT books to start studying, does your mind tend to wander? Do you start to daydream? Do you think that you’ll never be able to get into your target school?

Nip these thoughts in the bud. The primary lever to reduce this sort of stress entails creating a targeted studying schedule. Work backwards from your planned Test Day (hopefully more than a month away) and pull out a blank sheet of paper to help focus your plan. Build a quick calendar and place your current appointments (classes, work, community service, etc.)—things that you can’t skip—into the calendar.

From this anticipatory standpoint, build in time (every day!) to study for the GMAT. Ensure that you work every subject area sufficiently. The key to this study schedule is to ensure you are constantly immersed in the material. Think of this like training for a marathon—if on Saturday you go out and run ten miles but don’t run at any other time during the week, you won’t complete the marathon. If you run a couple of miles every day or every other day (with a big run once a week), you will finish the marathon.

Studying all topics several times a week according to a pre-defined schedule will ensure your anticipation stress is reduced. The mere act of planning your GMAT preparation and engaging in a trusted, proven program can greatly reduce anticipation stress and help you get down to the business of raising your GMAT score.

Stay tuned next week for tips to help you manage yet another form of MBA applicant anxiety: performance stress.

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