A group of teenagers gathers after school at Math Guru, a small, independent tutoring center in Toronto, Canada. They sit in comfy chairs and sip mugs of tea. They’re here to work on their math homework, but not by memorizing formulas or solving problems. Instead, they’re going to talk about how their thoughts get in the way of finishing an assignment, solving a problem or passing a test. They will write down their fears on a piece of paper — for example, “I won’t get into university” — and then follow that with reasons why that fear is true or false. Soon it will become clear to them that their feelings aren’t a fair reflection of reality.
It’s a scene playing out in classrooms and tutoring programs across North America, where mindfulness training is the latest answer to fighting teen anxiety about school. Research increasingly shows that these techniques work, which explains their growing popularity.
“I would rush through my tests very fast,” says 15-year-old Sydney Tytel, of her approach to math before she began to attend Math Guru’s anxiety sessions two years ago. She had switched schools for ninth grade, and was struggling in her new class. The anxiety she felt made it hard for her to slow down and focus on the work in front of her.
But her anxiety wasn’t really about the math, it was about the work, which is actually more common in kids with strong math skills, says Math Guru owner Vanessa Vakharia. Knowing they’re capable of doing the work — if only they could focus — can worsen these teens’ self-doubt and second-guessing.
Tytel says that when you talk with your best friends and your own classmates you’re probably all stressed for the same reasons, which can make it harder to tackle the problem. But tutoring sessions that focus only on how students feel and think about math are different. “It’s very open and everyone can discuss in a safe place,” she says. “It’s not like you’re discussing with your close friends, you’re discussing with people you don’t really know. It gives you a different perspective.” These students may be learning the subjects in other ways, or just have unique strategies for handling anxiety and time management, she says.
IIt’s not just parents, tutors and teenagers who recognize the anxiety-busting value of mindfulness training. Schools are working mindfulness practices like breathing exercises, meditation, yoga and cognitive therapy into their curriculum, too, or making them available outside the classroom. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but mindfulness training has become so popular that tens of thousands of students in the U.S. and Canada are learning how to use it — for math, for sports, for an alternative to detention, and more — and there are entire school boards in both countries that have implemented mindfulness techniques into their curricula.
Teenagers increasingly need these coping strategies.
Nearly a third of American adolescents between the ages of 13 and 18 met the medical criteria for an anxiety disorder, and according to the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, almost 6 percent of teens have a severe anxiety disorder. Yet nearly 80 percent of kids with a diagnosable anxiety disorder aren’t receiving adequate treatment, according to other research.
For some teenagers, anxiety can cross the line into mental illness and, in some cases, lead to suicide. There are towns in the United States — including Palo Alto, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley, Colorado Springs, Colo. and Lexington, Mass. — where there have been suicide clusters and suicide attempts among teenagers overwhelmed by the stress of high-pressure academic environments and competition for acceptance to prestigious universities.
And the stress is not just in high-income communities like Palo Alto, with academically rigorous high schools. Mindful Schools focuses specifically on low-income students, for example, and one study found that attending regular mindfulness meditation sessions relieved stress for low-income students at a rural alternative high school.
Schools in the United Kingdom began to employ mindfulness techniques in earnest back in 2007, when they were introduced into the general curriculum. Since then, mindfulness for students has proven so effective that major educational institutions like U.C. San Diego, UCLA and the University of Massachusetts Medical School have created entire mindfulness centers, and various programs like Mindful Schools and MindUP train educators in mindfulness techniques.
TThe term “mindfulness” has come to mean an increasing number of things to the organizations exploring its potential benefits. But for health professionals and trained mindfulness educators, the definition is more specific.
“Mindfulness means paying attention with intention, non-judgement, and acceptance to what’s happening in the present moment,” says Randye Semple, a clinical psychologist and professor at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. “We look at whatever arises — whether we like it or not, we just look at it. Mindfulness is just attention training.”
Practicing mindfulness requires you to stay in the present instead of dwelling on the past or fantasizing or worrying about the future, says Dr. Amy Saltzman, a physician in California who teaches kids about mindfulness.
This narrows your attention, and makes it easier to make good choices based on what’s actually in front of you.
“We talk about it a lot, staying present, being present. But I don’t think we talk about what that actually means,” Vakharia says. “It means being able to separate the thoughts in your head from real life and what’s actually happening right now.”
Back at Math Guru, the kids start digging into what’s behind their feelings of anxiety. Part of that work includes introducing the participants to techniques that can help them manage stress during an exam or assignment: breathing exercises, for example, and understanding why anxiety takes over in the first place.
When left to themselves, inner thoughts can lead to anticipatory anxiety, which is when people start imagining bad things that could happen in the future — for example, when a teenager taking a test imagines failing, and then flunking the course and then not getting into college. Suddenly, they’re not paying attention to the questions in front of them but are lost in the imagined terror of a bleak future.
This is why the first symptom of anxiety is inattention, Semple says; our minds can only pay attention to so much at once, so the focus on things that might happen in the future (not getting into college) overtakes the focus on what is happening in the present (taking a test).
The skills Tytel’s learned at Math Guru don’t only help with her schoolwork, she says. “I think more about how I solve problems. I can apply this to my everyday life.”
There are benefits to teaching these techniques at a young age, according to Semple.
Studies seem to indicate that if anxiety can be managed in younger adolescents, more serious problems may be avoided later on, she says. And if kids can be reached before anxiety becomes a clinical condition, they will be able to focus their attention much more easily.
Boys have their own specific challenges with anxiety, Vakharia says — they’re reluctant to admit they experience it, lest they appear weak in front of their friends. But the fact that it’s more acceptable for girls to admit to those feelings doesn’t save them from anxiety’s negative effects.
“There definitely is a gender divide,” Vakharia says. “With girls, a lot of it is about tackling their low confidence.” Teenage girls feel like they’re expected to struggle with math, and that can feed into the anxiety they’re already experiencing. “They almost feel like they should be acting that way,” she says. “They should freak out, they should be upset, they should think they’re bad at math.”
SSaltzman lives in Menlo Park, one town north of Palo Alto, where the teen suicide rate is four times the national average and has been studied by the Centers for Disease Control. Saltzman points to one research paper that suggests that school-based mindfulness programs could reduce and prevent adolescent depression, which would mean lowering the risk of suicide.
“When you live in a community where you have children standing in front of trains, that’s huge,” Saltzman says. “If we had a medication that was low-cost that you could give to everybody and you knew that you could dramatically decrease depression, you would probably do it.” So why not, she argues, do the same for mindfulness?
Though the evidence on the potential effects of mindfulness on the adolescent brain is still limited, the body of research on the overall effectiveness of these techniques continues to grow.
Ultimately, teens know they’re stressed — and as they move closer to the end of high school, it’s likely the stress will only increase.
It makes sense that they’re increasingly interested in tools to manage that stress, even if they may seem unconventional on the surface, Saltzman says.
For Tytel, that means squeezing Silly Putty. Students at Math Guru are given loot bags, she explains, and she brings the ball of Silly Putty she got in hers to math class; when the work makes her feel anxious, she gives it a squeeze and it helps.
The time Tytel has spent at Math Guru talking with peers about how to manage her anxiety has paid off. These days, her approach to taking tests is considerably less rushed and far more successful. Instead of just trying to solve the math problem, she says, “it’s become about thinking about the problem in different ways until one works.”
