My big freak out was way at the beginning of the process. I knew I was going to do badly on the physics GRE, but I still thought I would be at the low end of okay; it didn't seem to go too badly. But then the day before I was scheduled to take the general GRE I relented under peer pressure (hadn't been planning to do this 'till after I did the general GRE) and called ETS to receive my physics GRE score on the phone... yeah, my score was at least 200 points lower than I'd expected, and let's just say they almost don't go lower. When I heard the first digit of my score I panicked and almost dropped my phone. I think I cried for about 4 hours after...
Then I basically made myself sick with anxiety over the general GRE, knowing that I needed a perfect QGRE score to counter my awful, so, so bad PGRE score. I couldn't eat for the whole day preceding the general GRE, couldn't sleep, and was so sick that I thought I would throw up during the test. Yeah, so I pretty much freaked out when I saw the word "quantitative" and my heart rate went up and.... I did badly. I KNOW it was from the anxiety, too (c'mon, high school math for physics major!) So badly. Then I freaked out even more when I got the score because I knew that the two bad scores combined were going to kill my applications (which are otherwise stellar). I wanted to retake it, but I was afraid I'd just panic again and have two identical, bad scores - so I didn't.
Basically I've been incredibly depressed since then, and whenever I freak out, it's still a mini-GRE freakout (all the stuff causing me misery started with the GRE and has continued, like some unending nightmare). The worst part is that having only received rejections so far, I'm reasonably certain I will be redoing them. The very thought makes me nauseous...
