Practical Trauma-Informed Strategies to Reduce Anxiety in Students w/ Jessica Minahan
Rates of anxiety and depression have doubled since the pandemic, and increasingly, I’m working with a lot of students who are struggling with anxiety, as is every learning specialist I know. I signed up for Jessica Minahan’s webinar, “Practical Trauma-Informed Strategies to Reduce Anxiety in Students,” because I was hoping to learn more about how anxiety works on a neurobiological level and how it impacts academic functioning. The webinar was excellent, and I learned a lot. For starters, there’s a direct correlation between anxiety and working memory: as anxiety goes up, working memory goes down at exactly the same rate. Working memory is how we’re able to access information in short and long-term memory as needed, and it's required for pretty much anything we're doing in school. It’s how we retrieve information as needed and how we hold multiple steps in mind; it is also required to regulate our own behavior. I was shocked to learn that we can lose 13 to 20 points of our IQ when we're stressed!
Additionally, as anxiety goes up, self-regulation, accurate and flexible thinking, and executive functioning skills, including organization of materials, time management and future planning, all go down. Moreover, when we’re anxious, negative thinking is the default. Negative and all-or-nothing thinking increases anxiety, which decreases working memory, so it’s not surprising that a negative or inaccurate thought almost always precedes work avoidance. Work avoidance is one of the main reasons students find themselves in my office, and understanding its causes better will be a huge help in knowing how to better support them.
According to Minahan, there are three common ways kids/teens (and I’d argue adults) think negatively about work when anxious:
According to Minahan, there are three common ways kids/teens (and I’d argue adults) think negatively about work when anxious:
- I can't do this (inaccurately assess their ability)
- This is too hard (inaccurately assess the level of difficulty)
- This will take forever (inaccurately assess the length of time it will take)
Thus, we need to help students look at work with accurate thinking because when you think you can't do something, it has a neurobiological effect and now you actually can’t do it. Thus, if you tell students to think positively, you have neuroscience on your side. When a student is stuck and cognitively inflexible, it means they are anxious, which means we need to calm them down first because none of us can retrieve or access strategies when we’re anxious. Incentives do not teach skills. All they do is motivate. When it's a negative or inaccurate thought that is motivating work avoidance, incentives don't help. For exam, if a negative thought is preventing the initiation of writing, a graphic organizer is not going to help. We have to figure out how to help kids look at work with accurate thinking.
Unlike other disabilities, anxiety is not the same from day to day, and there’s a neurobiological skill change that occurs when anxious. Minahan explained how the frontal lobe is where all higher thinking occurs and that it's where sustained attention and future planning happen. She used our mental state when approaching solving a math problem as an example and explained how if you see a math problem when unstressed, the information passes through the eyes to the occipital area of the brain back to the frontal lobe so you can solve it. BUT if you look at a math problem when you are anxious, the information goes through the eyes and bounces off the occipital area, but instead of going through the limbic area, it gets stuck there in emotional looping, and the frontal lobe disengages. The problem-solving is now being done in the limbic system, which is telling you to flee!
One strategy we often use to combat students’ anxiety is to encourage them to take breaks, but Minahan argues that breaks aren't always the solution unless we teach a break strategy. Because many kids have thought-based dysregulation, we have to teach them a strategy for cognitive distraction and a break from their thoughts. Minahan likens the brain to a remote control. When anxious, we get stuck on a channel and need to change the channel to calm down. She advocates teaching students how to take change-the-channel breaks. Depending on age, these might include Sudoku, I spy or hidden picture books, Harry Potter trivia cards, or you might count backwards by threes from 100, say the alphabet backwards. You could also write on a Post-It, “what's the third verse of your favorite song?” or “name three fish that don't have the letter A,” or “count all the green things in the room.” By taking these change-the-channel breaks, we are recalibrating the student and getting the anxiety down and the skills back up. When our thoughts are engaged, we are calmer. If we simply tell kids to take a walk or a break, we might be teaching them avoidance by mistake. Although it may feel better to walk away from a stressful situation, doing so doesn't necessarily help us re-enter or manage anxiety to get our skills back up.
Having language to better describe what’s happening for the students I work with when they’re anxious is a huge part of being able to support them, as is being able to tackle their work avoidance head on. Minahan’s findings and recommendations will also be helpful in my work with teachers and with parents as we try to determine the best ways of supporting their students.
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