How Executive Functioning Can Ease Academic Anxiety

There is a dynamic, reciprocal relationship between executive functioning (EF) and academic anxiety. Students with robust EF skills (i.e., planning, organizing, prioritizing, inhibiting distraction, recruiting resources) have many of the foundations of academic success and are less likely to experience debilitating academic anxiety. Conversely, when students, even highly skilled students, fall into a pattern of intense academic anxiety and emotional dysregulation, their EF skills can become impaired.

Working with students, I’ve seen this first-hand. My smart and successful students who typically know how to plan, study, and organize their time become much less effective when they fall into a loop of anxiety. They may perceive a looming academic challenge as a threat, and they stop doing the very things that have made them successful in the past. 

I’ve also seen students with relatively weak EF skills feel unprepared to face academic challenges and anxious about their academic prospects. Often, students who experience significant academic anxiety have underlying skill deficits. In many cases, the skill deficits are the source of these students’ anxieties. If these students can build their base of skills and generate some successes, their anxiety abates.

Anxiety on a Continuum

We all experience some anxiety as a condition of being human. Some anxiety and stress is helpful, and even essential. Stress can be a powerful motivator, and at the right dose it can be conceived of as “eustress,” or good stress. Excessive stress, however, becomes distress and shifts from being a motivating force to a stifling force that impairs problem-solving.

Shifting Mental Gears

I was recently working with a very bright student who was struggling with a college-level class.  My student was experiencing a level of anxiety that was essentially paralyzing, so I spent some time talking with her about the neurobiology of stress. We discussed how she needed to activate her problem-solving centers and shift to her frontal cortex, where the executive functions take place. Shifting from fear to planning and problem-solving sends inhibitory neurotransmitters, GABA, towards the amygdala to calm activation patterns and down-regulate the stress response. I learned the importance of this conversation from psychiatry professor Dan Siegel, who has found that teaching students how their brain works pays meaningful dividends.

Once you begin putting a plan in place, the sense of dread and overwhelming anxiety shifts. My student came up with specific steps to pass her course:

1. Spend more time on task. An hour one night before exams is inadequate.
2. Shift the workflow during the week and tackle the problem sets in advance of the office hours.
3. Go into the office hours with explicit, written questions, directly from the problem sets.
4. Attend all office hours between now and the final.
5. Find a content-specific tutor, on or off campus, to supplement the class time.

With a plan in place that my student helped to craft, she was shifting from anxiety to execution, from the abstract fear of failing a class towards the concrete implementation of a specific plan with timelines and actionable steps. The amygdala calms down when there is a plan to follow and a challenge to overcome.

Building Strong EF Skills as a Buffer against Anxiety

Students who attend to their EF skills may decrease their levels of anxiety. There are multiple mechanisms at play:

• Strengthening the executive function of inhibition can help modulate the activity of the amygdala. 
• Strengthening working memory can help in the processing and regulation of emotions.
• Strengthening cognitive flexibility, the ability to shift perspectives and avoid rigid thinking patterns, can help decrease anxiety.
• Improving planning and problem-solving can increase feelings of self-efficacy and decrease anxiety.
• Increasing the ability to focus attention and inhibit distraction can help give a measure of cognitive and emotional control.
• Enhancing goal-directed behaviors can increase perceptions of ability and self-efficacy, which has been shown to decrease anxiety.

To learn more about the EF support that Applerouth can provide, schedule a call with one of our Program Directors.

Building resilient and successful students is our goal. If we can help students strengthen their EF skills, they’ll be prepared to succeed in a variety of academic environments and conditions. 

Moreover, students with strong EF skills will be better suited to navigate academic challenges without experiencing debilitating anxiety and to seek out help and support when they need it, in academic and non-academic domains.