5 Ways Anxiety Affects School Performance
Anxiety isn’t always something you can just brush off and push through. When it becomes chronic, symptoms can affect your daily life and school performance. So you’re not being “dramatic” if things get difficult whenever your nerves feel high. Engaging in self-care habits can help you work through your anxiety and help you find success on the other side.
Diving into assignments may feel like the best way to rid yourself of school anxiety, but prioritizing your wellness outside of the classroom is actually just as important for performance, if not more. Practice morning meditations, go on walks, and make time for something you love every day.
What’s the cost? These are very real ways anxiety can affect school performance.
1. Physical Aches & Pains
It’s pretty hard to pay attention in class with a splitting headache. Add surprise stomach aches, searing jaw tension, and other random aches and pains, and you can barely think, let alone read a passage.
Plus, fixating on how to cure the physical symptoms can encourage a longer cycle of worry, especially if you work with a doctor and come up with no known cause.
2. Trouble Processing New Information
Sometimes, teachers can forget that students have full lives outside the classroom. Schedules press on, due dates fly by, and before you reach the end of a unit, you realize you haven’t paid attention to any of it.
If you’re distracted by the anxiety of family problems at home or the pressure of an upcoming sports tryout, you may not fully hear what your teacher says during the day. Learning happens when you can pile new ideas and concepts onto previously known information.
When your brain hasn’t properly stored the first lessons it learned, the rest of the class becomes hard to follow. It’s like trying to make ice without an ice tray.
3. Stressful Group Projects
Social anxiety can affect school performance in a couple of different ways. If you feel anxious being around other people, it can make you feel isolated and lower your confidence and self-trust.
Even outside social settings, plenty of academic milestones are contingent on working well with others. It’s hard to present your contribution to a project if you’re in your head about the way you stand while speaking. You might never give it your all in gym class if it risks tripping, falling, and embarrassing yourself in front of everyone.
4. Freezing Up
If it doesn’t cause a panic attack, test anxiety can cause you to freeze up and blank. It’s important to remember that tests aren’t perfect reflections of our knowledge or capability. Underperforming on a test or in a class isn’t a true indicator of the value we inherently carry as human beings.
Outside of tests, it can be hard to convince teachers you want to do good work when you avoid eye contact during lectures in the hopes of never getting called on. It’s not your fault—a spotlight would empty your brain immediately and make you bite your tongue.
5. Motivation
When it’s well-regulated, anxiety can serve as excellent motivation to push yourself to new heights or focus on a difficult challenge. You may become more agile, detail-oriented, and creative. Some people believe they consistently perform better under pressure than in relaxed situations.
Relying on anxiety as a motivator, however, isn’t sustainable long-term. But every now and then, you can trust it to keep you safe. It’s instinct!
If your anxiety is chronic, therapy can reframe your thinking to help you perform better in school. It can give you the tools you need to process your anxiety that doesn’t affect your test scores or ability to speak up in class. Contact our office today to see how we can help you address your school anxiety.
