How anxiety affects school performance?

As a counselor who has worked extensively with children, adolescents, and college-age students, anxiety is one of the most common struggles that affect school performance. To understand how anxiety affects school performance, it is important to understand the sides of how anxiety is manifested. Physically, people can experience many symptoms like sweating, shaking, labored breathing, nervous stomach, headache, and even tearfulness. Mentally, people often experience blanking out or overthinking, catastrophizing (which is thinking of the worst case), and core thoughts that look like, “I am not good enough,” or “I must be a failure.” Emotionally, people can feel scared, fearful, nervous, worrying, and distracted. Bringing this all together towards school performance can feel daunting. People either have generalized anxiety or panic that can affect school performance or because people can associate school performance with pressure and anticipated failure, they begin to apply all of their anxiety symptoms through the lens of schooling. Like tunnel vision, many people, especially younger ones who do not yet have the dialogue to talk through their experience, can become debilitated in completing school and managing their anxiety.

Once school performance is affected…

On the flip side of this scenario is a very positive one for many people because anxiety and its variants are the most amenable disorders that can be treated. Typically, clients begin to normalize their fears and feel validated for having them. They gain skill sets and insight into how they perform in school and find appropriate ways to manage test-taking, studying, organization, and overcoming procrastination behaviors. Although they may still experience bouts of anxiety with new experiences like a new class or new environment, they also learn that anxiety is a substitution disorder usually substituting one worry for the next. Once a client sees this pattern, they can find ways to rectify it with their counselor. Another common area in which anxiety affects school performance is when anxiety has created a perfectionism that needs to be addressed. Expected imperfections, mistakes, and failures can be viewed as part of the learning process. The best strategy is not to ignore the anxiety that is affecting performance but rather addressing it fully. By doing this, all areas of health begin to improve.