When it comes to Math Anxiety, are you a worrier or are you panic-stricken? It turns out the answer to this question is key to how you will go about fixing it.
- My mouth feels dry and my heart starts beating out of my chest.
- I read the question over and over again, and I just can’t understand what it says
- I get sleepy and have a really hard time staying awake for the exam.
- My palms get sweaty and it gets hard to focus on the page
- My teacher is stupid, and never asks questions about what we have been learning in the class.
Does any of this sound familiar when you sit down to do a math test? The truth is that, to one degree or another, we’ve all had similar experiences. These are natural physiological responses that arise when we perceive threats to our well-being. But if you look at these questions again, you’ll see that they fall into two broad categories: thinking and feeling. And the big insight from recent research, though, is that worry is expressed in the left hemisphere, while panic is expressed in the right. Like much good research, this actually confirms our intuition. The Feeling Right Hemisphere Panic is about feelings. Beating heart, sweaty palms, heightened perceptions. These are exactly the same physiological responses we would feel when we encounter a big cat in the jungle. It is raw survival. And you are experiencing the exact same flood of neurochemicals when we are sitting in the math exam, staring at a question that we can’t even understand the problem, much less figure out the solution.
This phenomenon is way more common than you might expect. You may be surprised to learn that math anxiety rates number three on the list of most common phobias that people experience, just after fear of public speaking and fear of heights. You are not alone, my friend. I will be writing an article soon future article on how to combat math panic. It turns out it is different than what you need to do to get ahead of your panic, as I’ll discuss below. The Thinking Left Hemisphere Worry is mostly a verbal activity: our inner conversation spirals endlessly with the details of how our life will fall apart if we don’t do well on this test. Our parents won’t love us any more, and will stop paying for our education. Our boyfriend or girlfriend won’t want to be seen with the idiot that we really are. The whole thing just spirals until we might be amazed that we are actually still breathing!
The truth is, in my 11 year experience as a math professor teaching thousands of students, I have seen more kids blow their learning energy by worrying during study sessions, rather than focusing on effective strategies for learning, remembering and achieving. They come in feeling defeated from the beginning.