Reducing Student Anxiety, Improving Student Wellbeing
WHAT’S THE ISSUE: Are stress and anxiety the same thing? Reducing student anxiety is one of my areas of expertise. I work with kids and adult students whose anxiety is affecting their academic success and wellbeing. In this article you will learn:
- how stress and anxiety differ
- about different types of student anxiety
- when I can help a student who is suffering from too much anxiety (and when I can’t)
- why meaningful curriculum development decisions in schools, governments, and educational organizations can help reduce student anxiety levels
There is a gap in national and international secondary school curricula, with regards to emotional literacy education, which is contributing to student well-being issues in schools and universities. We need people who are responsible for curriculum development to help us fill this emotional learning gap; unbalanced secondary school curricula are partly responsible for some of the unhealthy levels of student anxiety we see in schools and universities today.
STRESS AND ANXIETY: ARE THEY THE SAME THING?
“I see ever more adverts for tutors whose primary focus is to support a child’s emotional needs. One recent posting described a student with ‘anxiety issues and a real fear of having a go at something publicly where he might be seen to fail’. The advert continued: ‘Looking for a mentor to click with him, to support him, to be there as a mentor and guide.'”
Emma Irving (2020) The Economist
One of the mistakes people make is to assume that stress and anxiety are interchangeable terms. Yes, there are overlaps, but they are not the same. The main thing to bear in mind is that stress is a physiological response that occurs in the body. Stress involves the release of stress hormones into our body, such as cortisol and adrenaline, and it involves the activation of the body’s fight-flight-freeze-faint response via the Autonomic Nervous System. Stress is primarily a biological problem. Anxiety is also inevitably partly a biological problem (how can it not be – we feel it in our body!). However, anxiety also has a more pronounced emotional component.
It’s important to understand this difference between stress and anxiety, because a child may present as someone who does not “look” stressed (because you are assuming that everyone who is stressed must also be anxious)…when in fact they are very stressed. And unless they get professional help, they will continue to underachieve in their academics, miss deadlines, and generally suffer from low energy and motivation. All because their stress levels are too high to be able to manage their time and behavior well, and because the problem is not being addressed at it’s root cause.
In some cases, students may be really stressed and overwhelmed due to academic pressure, without experiencing anxiety. In other cases, students may experience high levels of anxiety along with high levels of stress. If a child is reporting experiencing a lot of anxiety for weeks or months on end, it is important that they get the right kind of professional support for the type of anxiety and degree of severity of anxiety that they are suffering from. The same is true for chronic stress.
Parents often come to me after having taken their very anxious child to an appropriately trained child psychologist to get tested, only to find that the tests were inconclusive – their child is not mentally ill due to too much anxiety. The child does not have a mental illness like an Anxiety Disorder. This is one way that I know that their child’s anxiety issues are within the mid-range of severity, and that I can help them to feel better in my work with them as mentor and EFT Practitioner. But there are also other ways I know whether I can or cannot help a student who is suffering from too much anxiety.
REDUCING STUDENT ANXIETY: WHEN I CaNNOT HELP
“The problem is that always having to “be strong” means we’re so used to the idea that life is all about enduring hardships that we just carry on trying to cope with what’s in front of us, rather than stepping back and considering that there may be other ways of dealing with problems. It means we brush off people’s offers of support; saying things like ‘Oh I’m ok—other people are worse off than me.’…If struggling on has always been the way we’ve dealt with problems, it’s easy to think that this is what strength is all about. But that’s not real strength; it’s suffering, and in the end it causes more harm than good.”
Marléne Rose Shaw (2021) “Being Strong Won’t Get Rid of Your Anxiety”
In some cases, the reason why I can’t help a student with anxiety is because they don’t want to be helped; they have belief that only “weak” people ask for, or accept offers of help. On two occasions, I had a parent who really wanted me to help child who had too much anxiety, and the child didn’t want to accept the help and get out of their comfort zone to try something different. I never take on a child unless they are willing and ready to get out of their comfort zone and try something different. In one of the two cases, the child was willing to accept the help a year later, after their anxiety had escalated to a distressing exam-related panic attack. After that, he was ready to accept help and to reevaluate his old blocking belief that only weak people accept help, so that I could help him feel better with some EFT tapping sessions for panic and anxiety.
If a student’s anxiety is severe, meaning it’s gone beyond the threshold for the mid-range of anxiety that I am able to help with, I inform the child as well as the parent (if the child is school-age) that they need to find a good specialist who is qualified to do diagnose and treat severe anxiety. There is a difference between treating what has developed into a mental illness, whereby the problem is not longer just one of supporting a student’s wellbeing and mental health, supporting a student’s mental health and well-being when the anxiety is still in the mid-range of severity. An example of a severe anxiety disorder some young people suffer from is Agorophobia, where the young person starts missing weeks and even months of school because their anxiety prevents them from feeling able to leave the house. Another example of a severe anxiety problem that requires specialist attention is students who suffer from, is Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD). And of course, sometimes kids are suffering from a clinically diagnosed General Anxiety Disorder These are examples of severe forms of student anxiety that can only be diagnosed and treated by qualified specialists. I can neither diagnose nor treat student anxiety that has reached the point of being a mental illness.
One of the wellbeing tests that helps me get a picture of a student’s overall wellbeing levels, when they are presenting with a lot of anxiety, is the Young Persons Core Test (YP-Core). The YP-CORE test is a 10-item general wellbeing test that is currently being used in UK schools and the NHS by teachers, counsellors, and doctors to identify how well students age 11-16 are functioning. Any child whose Young Persons Core test (YP-Core test) score is above the 25 point threshold for severe distress (the red zone in the diagram below) is in a state of severe distress, and this is beyond my skills and area of expertise.
When I can help is when a parent brings their child who is in the orange range of emotional dysregulation and well-being issues. Similarly, if a student’s anxiety score in the GAD-7 Young Person test score is above the threshold for severe anxiety (see below), I know that this is a level of distress that is beyond my area of expertise.
When I can help a student reduce their anxiety is when the anxiety is still in the mid-range of distress (moderate anxiety or moderately severe anxiety). No one comes to me whose child has healthy levels of anxiety. They don’t need to; their child is not suffering.
REDUCING STUDENT ANXIETY: WHEN I CAN HELP
“The children are definitely feeling the pressure. Many students I work with admit to using drugs to help them focus more, such as ritalin, a stimulant used to treat attention-deficit disorders. According to research in 2019 by YouGov, a polling company, one in seven teenagers in Britain who had taken GCSE exams in the previous two years admitted to taking a ‘study drug without a prescription’. It’s a notable departure from the drugs traditionally associated with teenage rebellion.”
Emma Irving (2020) The Economist
ANXIETY RELATED TO ADHD AND OTHER LEARNING DIFFICULTIES
Generally speaking, when the parent or the child is looking for an alternative solution to drugs for ADHD, this is one area where I can often help.
Sometimes kids who have been diagnosed with ADHD experience very distressing physical side-effects from taking drugs such as Ritalin, causing them to rebel and not want to take them, even if they help them focus and do better in school. Refusing to take the pills, or saying they have taken them when they haven’t, turns into a stressful daily battle between parent and child.
In other cases, parents who have received an ADHD diagnosis want to first go the lifestyle changes route. For example, I once mentored an adolescent who was diagnosed with ADHD in Primary School, but the parents wanted to first try natural and alternative solutions before going the chemical route. By the time they come to me for mentoring, their adolescent child has already been retested after years of making changes to the child’s diet, exercise routine, sleep routine, etc and she no longer qualified for a diagnosis of ADHD. In her case, we just focused on helping her process friendship-related stress and anxiety, as academics were no longer a worrying issue.
In addition to ADHD, there are other learning disabilities that can cause emotional distress for school and university-age students. Dyslexia, dyscalculia – these are just some examples of learning disabilities that can exacerbate a child’s academic anxiety.
Over time, the stress of (for example) writing something down, and thinking you wrote it a certain way, and then realizing you the way you wrote it wasn’t actually the way you thought you wrote it can cause a build up of distressing emotions, such as anxiety.
Students with ADHD are more likely to suffer from anxiety that is related to repeatedly missing deadlines. Creating opportunities for ‘decluttering’ this build up of emotional distress helps support the wellbeing of students with learning disabilities like dyslexia or ADHD.
[Student Voice] Click here if you wanna read about a student’s experience of ADHD and anxiety.
ANXIETY RELATED TO SCHOOL GRADEs, PRESENTATIONS AND COMPETITIONS
There are different types of anxiety that secondary school students and Uni/college students can experience. In her latest book, The Science Behind Tapping, Dr. Peta Stapleton encourages the use of EFT “tapping to explore and assist with emotional distress attached to learning concerns”, ranging from anxiety concerns related to learning disabilities to anxiety concerns related to:
- Test/exam anxiety
- Sports performance anxiety
- Anxiety in high-performing students
- Math anxiety
- Public-speaking anxiety
- Anxiety related to making and keeping new friends
As a tapping practitioner, I’ve noticed that a lot of these different types of school-related anxiety are related to paralyzing perfectionism and a huge fear of failure. Interestingly, I often also find that another common source of anxiety is when a student has quite a strong Fixed Mindset about their ability in a subject.
In particular, I find that a student’s anxiety about an upcoming Math test or Math exam is highly correlated with a Fixed Mindset. When we tap away some of that destructive Fixed Mindset to help the student move into a more constructive Growth Mindset, the anxiety literally starts to melt away!
When a student I mentor is presenting with Test Anxiety, I use a questionnaire that is being used in schools in the UK called the Test Anxiety Questionnaire. It is a 10-item self-assessment that allows students to see if the level of test anxiety they experience is normal (too little test anxiety is a problem for focused productivity, as is too much). If their score is above the threshold for Test Anxiety, we focus on the most distressing aspects of the testing experience that are causing the anxiety to process that distress using the Emotional Freedom Technique.
However, a lot of the time the root cause of the problem isn’t actually Testing Anxiety (though this may be how the problem presents itself at first). For example, I once mentored a High School student who had experienced three increasingly distressing panic attacks in exam and test conditions where she froze and forgot everything she had studied, in the lead-up to her pre-Bacc exams (European Baccalaureate).
While the problem presented itself as Test Anxiety, she actually had very healthy and normal levels of Test Anxiety. It was clear that Test Anxiety was not the problem. We discovered that because she was a highly sensitive person who felt others’ energy intensely (their joy, their sorrow, their panic), she had been unconsciously picking up on the increasing nervous and anxious energy of her classmates in her class and exam room environment, as the high-stakes Bacc exams approached.
After processing the most distressing memory of when this last happened in a Math test, which was causing her a lot of residual anxiety, we then worked on helping her create a pro-active stress management routine that would allow her to protect her energy from the anxiety in her exam environment.
Her confidence and belief in herself grew as we systematically worked on overcoming her fear that she might experience another panic attack in exam conditions during a personalized 12-session mentoring program involving mindfulness and grounding exercises; breath work, success visualisations, and of course EFT tapping sessions for releasing excess anxiety.
She recently achieved her personal goal of getting an 8 or more on her final European Baccalaureate Diploma – without suffering from another panic attack in exam conditions.
ANXIETY RELATED TO BEING 'IN YOUR HEAD' A LOT OF THE TIME
Some people are by nature a bit more head-based, in that they spend a lot of time in their head, thinking about things. For example, I once mentored a teenager who described herself as being really curious, someone who felt comfortable in the world of thoughts and in subjects that allowed her to develop her knowledge in subjects like, Maths and Sciences, and who always wanted to know why things were the way they were.
However, under stress, she would move into over-thinking mode. Over-thinking sparked a worry cycle that was keeping her anxiety stuck in place. The world of emotions was quite frightening for her. She was getting good grades and doing fine in school, but her emotional vocabulary and emotional literacy were underdeveloped for her age, and her underdeveloped emotional intelligence was creating some social anxiety when it came to making and keeping friends.
For a case like this, diving straight into the world of emotions and social-emotional learning would completely freak her out (some students are thirsting to dive into their emotions right away – but we’re all different, and we need to meet our students where they are at).
Her parents were keen to support her in developing her social skills, EQ skills, and mindfulness skills. They were aware of the link between social skills, mindfulness, and emotional intelligence. We agreed on a personalized mentoring program for their daughter that involved gently entering the world of emotions through body-based approaches, to helping develop their daughter’s mindfulness skills so that she could start to better understand how thoughts, emotions, and body sensations connect. That work took place in the first 4 sessions.
We then took a break from the world of emotions in the next 4 sessions, to go back into her comfort zone of intellectual learning where I taught her little idiomatic expressions (English was not her first language, so filling this conversational English gap was important for reducing her social anxiety and improving communication with peers who were native English speakers) and phrases she could say to help her start and keep a conversation going.
We finished the mentoring program with 4 more sessions that involved going back into developing her body intelligence and emotional intelligence with more body-based mindfulness exercises, to help her start to notice how her body response to social situations, and to develop a ‘toolbox’ of what she can do to help herself in those anxious moments.
I also taught her new emotional vocabulary. This is particularly helpful for kids who are in their head a lot, as some of the anxiety and stress they feel when big emotions come up is due to the fact that they don’t have the words to label these sensations.
RETHINKING CURRICULUM DESIGN IN SCHOOLS
When we teach kids emotional vocabulary, it helps them to feel less scared and confused about the world of emotions. One of my areas of expertise is student anxiety.
I’ve noticed that a lot of the angst that comes up when they feel tense or uncomfortable in a social or exam situation stems from the fact that these intense body sensations and emotions are an ‘unknown’ for them. It’s like a foreign and scary place.
By demystifies this unknown world and helping them balance the academic progress they are making in school by teaching them body awareness skills and emotional knowledge, they start to come back into balance. They realize that the world of emotions is simply another form of knowledge, it’s no longer such a confusing and scary place.
Up until now, most school curricula and the curricula exams and universities neglect this empowering form of knowledge, creating an unbalanced learning experience for students that prioritizes the development of academic knowledge and skills at all costs.
However, more and more forward-thinking parents and schools are adapting to the evolving needs of the 21st-century as they embrace building mindfulness and EQ (Emotional Quotient) skills teaching into their kids’ education. As an Educational Consultant, how we can achieve this inevitable curriculum development evolution in secondary school education is an area where I can help.
A lot of social or academic anxiety that students experience in schools stems from an unbalanced curriculum that neglects the development of EQ skills. As a result, students are not being adequately equipped to have the knowledge and skills they need to experience the emotional balance and well-being.
Partly, that is because even subjects such as PSHE, delivered to teenagers with British school curriculum, don’t cut the mustard when it comes to EQ skills and mindfulness skills. The personal and social education taught in PSHE classes is often just as head-based as the rest of their classes, barely scratching the surface of body awareness and emotional intelligence skills education.
SEEING THE BIGGER PICTURE: ANXIETY, EDUCATION & SOCIAL- EMOTIONAL LITERACY
“As relationships are critical to well-being, it is surprising that we do not pay more attention to what enables people to get on well together, and how to resolve differences when conflict arises. Our society promotes a range of ‘literacies’, but needs to be equally, if not more, attuned to the emotional literacy that underpins healthy relationships. Unless young people are fortunate enough to be in a…school where social and emotional learning is a regular part of the curriculum, they may not learn the attitudes and skills that enable them to establish and maintain positive connection…We need to develop emotional literacy at all levels of society”.
Dr Sue Roffey (2021) Creating the World We Want to Live In
You would be surprised how many times what appears to be Test Anxiety isn’t actually test anxiety. Some kids who present with anxiety to do with schoolwork or workload discover, after we tap on the anxiety, that it’s actually a friendship problem, or the unprocessed heartache from a break-up that’s at the root of the anxiety. But because they’d been trying to forget about it, the unprocessed emotions piled up. The work piled up. The assignments piled up. And of course their anxiety then also piled up as they started to become more anxious and overwhelmed.
If education and curriculum reform is to make a meaningful impact on student wellbeing, it requires a fundamental paradigm shift where education includes a broader, big picture approach of making emotional literacy a “regular part of the curriculum”, as Dr Sue Roffey puts it in the aforementioned quote.
And of course, you’ve got to practice what you preach, and so inevitably it means making sure teachers have the attitude and skills required to be able to deliver this visionary 21st-century curriculum. There’s a tremendous opportunity here to up-skill the teaching profession and transforming school cultures into more humane, happy places where all levels of the school community have the knowledge, attitude, and skills they need to thrive.
Excellent work is already being done by teachers on the ground who are taking their own initiative in experimenting with how to build emotional literacy into their class, within the curriculum boundaries and the constraints placed upon them by school administrators and their school culture. It’s now time for courageous visionaries in education who are responsible for leading curriculum development from the top to have step up to the challenge of reforming national and international school curricula to keep up with the changing times and evolve.
The rise of mental illnesses and mental health problems rising in secondary school students and university-age students are causing psychology research to start spilling out into schools and education, from the grassroots up. Loads of caring teacher leaders in classrooms all over the world are already experimenting with ways of helping to support their students’ well-being (and therefore learning).
The question is: What needs to happen for more schools, educational institutions, and educational organizations to keep up with the changing times through a top-down curriculum reform approach that better supports student wellbeing…and in so doing, to demonstrate that they, too, care about their students?
REFERENCES
About the author
Eleni Vardaki works with individuals, small groups, schools and organizations online to support parent, teacher, and student well-being. Her mission is to help bridge the gap between mainstream education and the well-being skills we need to thrive in the 21st century. She believes in doable, sustainable interventions for student well-being in school and family cultures that value student and community well-being.
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