3 Ways Academic Anxiety Can Negatively Affect Your Teen

Many parents view stress and anxiety about school as a good thing (and it can be a good thing) but more and more we’re seeing an overload of academic anxiety negatively impacting students’ short and long-term well being.

It’s true that a certain amount of academic stress and anxiety can have positive impacts on students’ performance and growth. Indeed, the right balance of expectation and challenge are key factors in driving personal growth and improvements.

But in many ways we as a society have raised the bar so high that balance is harder to strike. Even elementary school students are expected to perform at higher and higher levels every year.

At significantly younger ages than in previous generations, teens and preteens experience college admissions pressures and strive to meet developmentally inappropriate and often unrealistic standards to maintain their educational traction.

Every year, more and more teens are reporting feelings of overwhelm and anxiety, with an estimated 32% of teens experiencing an anxiety disorder and an estimated 8% of teens experiencing an anxiety disorder that causes a severe impairment.

Yet, despite this unhealthy rise in anxiety levels, many parents have a positive view of the culture of achievement that’s driving this trend. Even for the many parents who don’t agree with the excessive demands, they embrace or participate in the culture for fear of their children missing out. They worry they’ll be depriving their kids of a future if they don’t keep up with the present day demands. Parenting FOMO.

If your child is navigating the modern educational system, especially as students are dealing with re-entry and/or continued virtual education, I urge you to take their stress and anxiety levels into account and help them develop adaptive ways to manage it. Try to bear in mind that when academic anxiety is not validated and well-managed, it can thwart many of the essential developmental milestones of adolescence.

Academic anxiety can literally inhibit, limit and impede their social, emotional and intellectual growth.

For example, when students experience academic anxiety, they often avoid learning challenges, resist exploring areas of potential interest, or disengage from social opportunities and experiences. In short, they can miss out on many of the extraordinary aspects of this stage of life! From my standpoint, this is the real FOMO. (If you’re looking for tools to help manage anxiety, please refer to my deeper dive in this Teen Brain Trust article.)

For now, let’s take a look at 3 ways academic anxiety can negatively affect your teen:

1) Academic anxiety is bad for their physical health.

Anxiety is “a series of biochemical changes in your brain and body, such as:

• An increase in adrenaline (causing your heart to beat faster)
• A decrease in dopamine (a brain chemical that helps to block pain, also associated with the reward system and feelings of happiness)
• An increase in cortisol which ultimately affects motivation, mood, and overall functioning
• These changes result in a state of heightened attention to the source of the anxiety (think: tunnel vision).

High levels of anxiety propel your body into a fight-flight-freeze response — essentially preparing to fight, run away, or not move at all. In this anxiety-hijacked state, the brain is unable to function at peak capacity.

High levels of anxiety also affect:

• Eating habits
• Amount and quality of sleep
• Motivation
• Overall Happiness
• Concentration
• Relationships

If your teen is experiencing anxiety over an extended time period (say, the school year), these effects can compound and worsen over time. This accumulation affects every aspect of functioning.

2) Academic anxiety lowers confidence and self-esteem.

From a psychological standpoint, ongoing academic anxiety negatively affects the student’s identity, confidence, and overall view of themselves as a person (self-worth).

Many students with anxiety generalize their current struggles as a testament to their character (“I’m not smart”), project its future implications (“I’ll never be successful”), or resort to black and white thinking (“I’m a failure”).

3) Academic anxiety makes it more difficult to learn.

This Cornell study cited above example has a great graph:

While some anxiety helps drive academic performance, when it gets too high, performance starts to flag again. A lot of students in the modern education system are on the far right side of this graph.

Anxiety interferes with students’ overall focus and concentration which leads to higher distractibility and difficulty switching between tasks. Furthermore, “numerous studies have concluded that anxiety can affect an individual’s ability to receive, process and retrieve information which has a negative impact on learning via influences on working memory, leading to poor mental performance and underachievement.”

And a lot of it has to do with the negative physiological effects. If you have no concentration, poor sleeping habits, poor eating habits, low motivation, and low overall happiness, then of course you’re not going to perform at a high level.

It’s ironic that the pressure to succeed can negatively affect your performance? Like it or not, this is something that many people experience. I know I have.

Ideally, as adults, we have developed a range of strategies to help us deal with stress and anxiety. But adolescents are just beginning to acquire and develop these foundational tools — ways of coping that may carry into adulthood.

Ideally, they’ll develop and cultivate healthy, adaptive lifelong methods for coping. But it’s possible for unhealthy coping strategies to gradually habituate. Unhealthy coping strategies that may haunt them throughout adulthood. Sounds scary? It can be!

I get it. As a mom, I worry about my teens’ achievement, trying to strike the balance between their being adequately challenged without their becoming too stressed and anxious. I go to great lengths to encourage them to identify and assess their individual internal stress mechanisms, and I do my best to support the tools they’ve discovered that help them manage their anxieties. I often keep myself in check by checking in with them.

As parents, we have a huge amount of influence over the amount of pressure our kids feel. Even when they’re pulling away from us, rejecting and rolling their eyes at us, we remain the most influential adults in our teens’ lives. But, we must be deliberate and aware of our messaging, its delivery and our teens’ interpretations.

All too often, our good intentions get lost in translation.

If you’d like to learn more check out my deep dive on this topic in collaboration with Teen Brain Trust.