School wasn’t meant to be a place of constant dread, but academic pressure has become overwhelming for many students today. What used to be a normal amount of worry over tests and assignments has become a debilitating fear that impacts learning, sleep, and much more. Academic anxiety impacts students of all ages and ability levels, and it generally causes more problems than the academic issues that initiated the stress in the first place.
Academic anxiety isn’t limited to pre-exam jitters. It’s a pervasive worry that makes even the simplest assignment seem daunting. Students suffering from this form of stress avoid challenging subjects, procrastinate on assignments, or even develop physical symptoms when confronted with academic tasks.
Recognizing the Symptoms
Academic anxiety manifests in different ways in different children, but there are a variety of common symptoms to look for. Many students develop perfectionist tendencies, spending too much time on assignments or becoming upset over what once seemed like minor errors. Others react with the opposite behavior, becoming quick to give up or avoiding difficult work entirely.
Physical symptoms are also a key indicator of academic anxiety. Headaches, stomach aches, insomnia, and frequent illnesses around test time can all be caused by stress. Some children become emotional about homework that didn’t bother them before, while others start expressing feelings of being “stupid” or “bad in school.”
The hardest thing about spotting academic anxiety symptoms is that they can all look different depending on the child’s age. Younger children might melt down over homework while teenagers frequently withdraw or begin making excuses to avoid school related activities.
When School Subjects are Stress-Inducing
Certain subjects appear to create more anxiety than others and often for the same reasons. Many of these subjects build on prior knowledge in a way that creates gaps which can become difficult for students to deal with over time. Writing assignments are among the most common sources of stress in upper elementary and middle schoolers due to the multi-faceted abilities they require (organizational skills, grammar skills, the ability to express thoughts clearly).
Many families find that enlisting the help of qualified English tutors reduces anxiety over reading and writing assignments because they break down complex skills into achievable chunks and provide the individualized attention that leads to the acquisition of true skill confidence. Reading comprehension anxiety is common in upper elementary and middle school as well when reading texts become more complicated and higher levels of comprehension are expected.
The Cycle of Avoidance
Here’s what commonly happens when a child develops academic anxiety: they struggle with a particular school subject or skill, which creates anxiety. To cope with this uncomfortable feeling, they begin avoiding the subject when possible — it’s harder to be anxious about something you aren’t doing, after all! However, this leads to avoidance creating a learning problem — especially in subjects where skills build on one another. Avoidance causes students to be less engaged with their learning, which eventually catches up with them in the form of falling behind (which increases their anxiety).
This cycle is especially harmful because it often starts small — with gaps in knowledge or skill that could be easily addressed — but it leads to major learning deficits over time. The longer it goes on, the more convinced the student becomes that they are simply not good at certain subjects. Breaking the cycle can happen if both academic and emotional issues are addressed.
Perfectionism
Anxiety is especially common among high achievers who have learned to be perfectionist about their schoolwork. These students have often internalized the idea that their self-worth is tied directly to their school performance. As a result, mistakes feel like much more than mistakes: they feel like failures.
Perfectionist tendencies are not inherently bad, of course. Many teachers encourage this approach as an excellent attention-to-detail quality. This becomes an issue when students spend far too much time on assignments rewriting essays multiple times or obsessively checking math problems before turning them in.
The problem with perfectionist students is that they often refuse help even when they really need it. Asking for help is seen as too big of a failure.
Developing Resilience
Academic stressors do not need to be eliminated completely; some amount of stress is actually beneficial. Developing resilience (the ability to bounce back) does require coping strategies and some realistic expectations about the academic environment.
For many students, learning that it’s okay to make mistakes and that mistakes are an essential part of learning goes a long way toward reducing anxiety associated with making errors on assignments and tests.
Students can develop a proper perspective on the role of mistakes through modeling by adults for example or discussion.
Breaks and balance also play a vital role in reducing academic anxiety. Students who are overwhelmed with activities (both academic and non-academic) often suffer from having too little time for important processing (internalizing what’s been learned) or too little time for recovery between daily stressors.
The Role of Adults
The role of adults in developing resilience cannot be underestimated. The attitude adults display towards academic performance is crucial in determining whether students grow resilient or anxious:
- Focusing on effort rather than results
- Focusing on improvement rather than excellence
- Maintaining perspective on the long-term importance (or lack thereof) of school results
Communication also plays a great role in helping students develop resilience. When children communicate openly about school-related worries and struggles we have an opportunity to help them.
It’s vital that children feel safe talking about school worries or trouble without fear of ridicule or without feeling like their issues should be solved immediately. Sometimes just being able to communicate feelings gets them through a tough patch rather than immediate solutions.
Resilient Students
The best approach to overcoming academic anxiety combines emotional support with skill support. There are students who really need academic help in certain subjects or skills which causes them to worry about how they’re doing academically even though these anxieties aren’t justified.
Most students who suffer from academic anxiety also benefit from coaching related to academic skill development which improves their specific anxiety inducing knowledge gaps. With some work and through acquisition of skills related support most anxious students can become resilient which opens up a world of opportunities even beyond their learning environments. Resilience is not only an essential skill for school-based concerns but also serves students well far beyond their academic experiences.
Academic anxiety does not need to define a student’s experience in school though. With appropriate help most students struggling with academically related anxieties can learn how to cope academically as well emotionally!
