Exam week p1

Is is possible to develop performance anxiety later in life?

I used to have no problem with pressure. 50% final that i haven't studied for, ppffff, no problem. Judo, public, speaking, music, no matter how bad i was (and i WAS bad) it didn't seem to phase me. But the last three semesters i've been getting worse. The last exam wrote i came out shaking with pains in my chest and so out of breath i couldn't smoke. How bad does you're stress level have to be if you can't even smoke?

What the hell happened?

I suppose as i get further and further in my schooling the exam do mean more and more. Maybe i'm becomeing aware of how much sloth in the past has cost me. But not really. Even if both of these things were true, these small changes wouldn't account for the huge increase in anxiety. Maybe it has to do with my love of Socrates? We all know his famous quote "all i know is that i know nothing." Because i was a cocky little bastard in high school and have become much more humble about my relationship with truth in the last little while. But i would think that mellowing out like that would make me less anxious. So on the one hand i know going in that i don't know everything but i also know that i never will or could know everything. So again that kinda balence wouldn't account for the major spike in stress levels.

That's one of the other strange things, it's not anxiety during the study period, i'm still mostly mellow leading up to the exam, it's just when i sit down that my liver starts trying to body check my brain. So i really don't understand this change in my life but the only option that kinda makes sense is how much more marks are worth as i get closer and closer to applying to grad school.

But his prospect worries me. If i'm going to continue getting more and more stressed as i get further and further in my education i don't know how i'm going to survive a PhD. Seriously, i've gone from flat line calm about exams to hyperventilateing frakshow in three semesters. With 5 semesters left to go. Then two more years of grad school. Then another two years of grad school. At current rates of digression i will be pillzee from the foamy cartoons around the time i get my MA, and my PhD convication will double as a wake.

Maybe that's the trick to getting your doctorate...you just have to survive. I know some pretty stunned profs. Maybe they got there just because they could handle the preassure. It's not so much higher learning as a sadistic gaunlet of agony.Each level more intense and impossible thn the last. CAffine highs and deadline lows, mountains of paper work to stumble across with only a thin blanket of student loans to cover your breaking back. Clashing swords on the perilous tundras of a thesis defences against hoards of souless monsters. But i digress...

I really don't know how an exam could get any worse...maybe it was just a bad term for me.