All the world's a test

How traffic lights and the SATs are the same in my brain

Illustration by Stephanie Davidson

The other day I was at the eye doctor doing the peripheral vision test. Do you know this one? You look at some dots in the middle of a white screen, and then some other faint grey dots blink at intervals around the edges of the screen. Each time you see a flickering grey dot, you press a button.

Anyways, I was doing this test and noticed that my heart was racing. My shoulders were squeezed up towards my ears, and my breathing was shallow and slightly fast. I was, all signs indicate, stressed about performing well on this peripheral vision test. Would I catch all those flighty little dots, each and every one? Was my finger reacting fast enough to register correctly in the machine? Such thoughts whirred just under the surface of my conscious mind, creating a general atmosphere of high nerves. When I sat back at the end of the test, my palms were slightly sweaty.

Here’s the thing: I’m not worried about my peripheral vision. I’m actually quite certain it’s fine, and even if something were wrong, the point of this test is to evaluate my vision, not to test my skills or rank my competency. But my brain couldn’t distinguish. My brain said, THIS IS A TEST, WE MUST DO WELL, RALLY THE TROOPS, WE GOTTA PERFORM, IT ALL HANGS ON THIS.

Nonsensical stress

Recently, I’ve been noticing times when my body has an outsized stress reaction. This happens when I take tests of any sort, no matter how inconsequential. It happens when I’m running late, or if there’s even a possibility I might start to run late, which is (in my mind) a test of how “on top of things” I am. Not making it through a traffic light is another big source of unreasonable stress. Say I’m driving down a street and see a traffic light ahead with a walk countdown, you can bet I am already calculating whether I can make it through the intersection. Making it through the light gives me a little rush of success, but the car in front of me decides to stop on yellow, you might find me frantically trying to turn into the next lane to go around the car and still make it through the light. I do this even when I’m not in a rush, as if every moment saved on the drive is a win. The other day I was actually trying to kill time in the car while the baby slept in the back, and I still automatically switched lanes to rush through traffic lights, heart pumping, neck tight, whipping my head back and forth. I may have lost my ambition, but I still wanted to ace this inconsequential test of making it through the light.

I have done a lot of thinking and writing about how my top-tier, fancy-pantsy education shaped me. I believe, for example, that the English classes at my highly academic private school laid the foundation for my love of writing, and honed the communication skills that I now use every day (of course, this can happen at many types of schools, but for me, it was an all-girls private school). We studied grammar every year from grades five to eleven, and while this still strikes me as decidedly overkill and basically a satire of all-girls education, I also walked away with an extraordinary command over written language.

But I also came out of that school with certain bodily habits that I’m only now naming, like the habit of sweating over tests, literally. It seems to me that in those years of schooling, my body learned that everything hangs on tests, and that therefore every test in life is an occasion for a full-body stress response. I did not learn in school how to steer towards a healthier mental and physical response to tests, or even how to distinguish between tests that really do matter and those that really don’t, like an annual peripheral vision test at the doctors office. Recently I have been feeling more and more like I have been programmed for acing, for winning, for getting an A, and that programming has extended way beyond school and work-related tasks to things like making it through traffic lights.

I think that identifying this type of stress programming is particularly important as achievement culture continues to surround students in both public and private schools. Research has shown that test-related stress and anxiety has increased in the US, associated with more frequent testing and high-stakes testing environments. Test anxiety doesn’t even help us perform, it can hurt performance since the stress makes it difficult to concentrate, affects memory, and can lead to physical symptoms like stomach aches and headaches.

It is obviously concerning that students are increasingly experiencing this type of stress, and there are a whole lot of people studying testing who are way more knowledgeable than I am. But the thing I’m focusing in on right now is the way that testing stress can bleed outside the boundaries of actual tests, how it has become part of my core operating system.

Enter: perfectionism

That same fancy private school didn’t have this same effect on everyone who went there. The result I’m describing—a generalized habit of getting stressed about anything even mildly test-adjacent—seems to also have to do with who I am genetically. People with higher levels of neuroticism and perfectionism, both of which have a genetic component, tend to have higher test anxiety. While I like to think I’m middle-of-the road on neuroticism, I definitely identify as a perfectionist.

It makes sense. Perfectionists want to perform perfectly on every test. We want to ace it, completely, always. And this can even apply to making it through traffic lights.

As I continue to conduct interviews in the Lady’s Illness Library, I continue to hear the same story over and over. I’m type A…I was super ambitions…kind of a perfectionist…pushed and pushed and pushed…got sick. I’m not saying this happens to every ambitious person, and I’m not saying perfectionism causes sickness, but I’m saying the story is too common to ignore.

And in the case of my story, I am increasingly placing emphasis on my nervous systems’ tendency to treat everything like a big, stressful test. That seems, at the very least, extraordinarily exhausting. It’s not hard to imagine how that habit, going on for years and years, could make me sick.

I’m curious…

What inconsequential, not-actually-a-test test makes you sweat?

Where do you fall on the perfectionist/neurotic spectrum?

Have you been able to change your nervous systems’ overreactions to stress?