Before an exam, many students feel their hearts racing and their thoughts blurring. This exam anxiety goes far beyond simple stage fright: it exhausts working memory, slows down responses and can cause a well-prepared test to fail. Psychologists describe a vicious circle where the fear of making a mistake degrades performance, which further reinforces anxiety.
A team from the University of Nanjing offers a concrete approach: a single 30-minute session ofmoderate aerobic exercise is enough to reduce this anxiety and improve concentration. Psychologists Lingfeng Wu and Renlai Zhou show that jogging on a treadmill helps very anxious students process conflicting information more quickly, without more errors, while modifying brain activity measured by electroencephalogram.
30 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise: the protocol studied
The researchers recruited 40 university students with strong exam anxietyassessed by questionnaire. The participants are randomly divided into two groups: one walks then jogs for thirty minutes on a treadmill, with intensity continuously monitored by heart rate; the other sits and reads neutral sports magazines. Before and after this half hour, everyone carries out the Flanker task on the computer, where you have to indicate the direction of a central arrow while ignoring neighboring arrows that are sometimes opposite. The test is presented as a predictive examination of future performance, with financial rewards for the best, to recreate the pressure of a real test.
After exercise, the “sports” group reported less anxiety, while the reading group did not change. On the Flanker task, active students responded faster in all conditions, with a reduced gap between easy and conflicting trials, a sign of inhibitory control more efficient. Their accuracy remains high, indicating that processing speed increases without sacrificing accuracy.
The electroencephalogram consists of a cap with small sensors placed on the scalp to detect electrical signals from the brain. Scientists were particularly interested in two types of brain waves: N2 and P3 waves. The study shows a decrease in the N2 component, linked to conflict detection, and an increase in P3, associated with the orientation of attention, only after exercise.
Why Aerobic Exercise Helps Inhibitory Control in Anxious Students
These results join a body of work showing that theexam anxiety disrupts the control of thoughts. Studies using standardized tasks (Flanker, Emotional Stroop or Go/Nogo tasks) have already found that very anxious people filter distractions less well, with more ruminations, physical tension and difficulty concentrating during tests.
Aerobic exercise increases dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin, which improves mood and the functioning of the prefrontal cortex, a key region for inhibitory control. Other research has shown that fifteen minutes of cycling can reduce anxiety, while ten or twenty minutes of uncontrolled activity does not. In their protocol, monitoring the intensity and measuring the N2 and P3 waves shed light on this relationship. The reduction in anxiety felt by students likely freed up mental energy. By not wasting their intellectual capacities on worrying, they have more cognitive resources available to tackle the task at hand without being overwhelmed.
What these results change for students and their limits
The authors point out that these effects only concern very anxious students, in a simulated test situation, and remain temporary after a single session. A thirty-minute run is only a temporary solution. Despite the treadmill session, the students’ stress levels remained relatively high.
The researchers plan to explore whether regular physical exercise, potentially combined with psychological therapies, could provide a more lasting response to study-related anxiety.