Anxiety during preparation

[userdeb24]

Hello,

I had to stop studying for the LSAT for a couple of weeks and I resumed my preparation recently.

However as I was working on the LR bible I started feeling anxious. I had made several mistakes during a problem set and after reviewing the answers some of them still did not make sense to me.

At that point I felt as though some concepts would never make sense to me (regardless of the fact that I have been studying for only a few weeks).

This anxiety was crippling to the extent that I had to stop studying for the rest of that day.

Does this often occur to your students and if so how could I cope with this in the future?

Thank you in advance for your answers.

[David Boyle]

Hello,

I had to stop studying for the LSAT for a couple of weeks and I resumed my preparation recently.

However as I was working on the LR bible I started feeling anxious. I had made several mistakes during a problem set and after reviewing the answers some of them still did not make sense to me.

At that point I felt as though some concepts would never make sense to me (regardless of the fact that I have been studying for only a few weeks).

This anxiety was crippling to the extent that I had to stop studying for the rest of that day.

Does this often occur to your students and if so how could I cope with this in the future?

Thank you in advance for your answers.

Hello userdeb24,

Feelings of "hopelessness" or anxiety can occur, and probably frequently do, to LSAT students. I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist, so I don't have huge expertise in dealing with these issues, but I would tend to say that people can often learn to cope with these kinds of issues.
PowerScore thinks it is a good idea to have a positive attitude about the test, which usually helps people do better. After all, for decades people have been taking the LSAT and doing well. So, it is likely that you can too. People once may have thought that Mount Everest couldn't be climbed, or that an airplane could not be invented. But eventually, people scaled the heights and flew in the air. If people achieved all that, and thousands of people have taken the LSAT and done well, you probably can too, if you keep working at it!
Of course, there's more to achievement than just telling yourself, "Hey, I'm confident today!" This is where preparation and consistent work come in. If you make mistakes, then just review them and the underlying theory. If you do that, it is likely that you will eventually understand answers to all the questions you had. (And if there are ones you still can't answer, just ask the questions on this forum, and someone can probably help you!)
While I don't have an automatic cure for anxiety, just be assured that many, many other people have surmounted the kinds of difficulties you have described and done very well on the test. A spirit of confidence, then, and continuing hard work to give background to that confidence, may be all you need. Good luck!

Hope this helps,
David