What is Anxiety?                                       

Anxiety is defined as “a painful or apprehensive uneasiness of mind usually over an impending or anticipated ill” . Students experiencing academic anxiety feel apprehensive over academic tasks.

 Students with anxiety disorders can be easily distressed or agitated according to what they consider a stressful situation. They often ask repetitive questions looking for reassurance and maybe inconsolable, often not responding to logical arguments/information.

Students and Anxiety Problems

Many educators are unaware of what anxiety is and how it affects their students. Anxiety is when a student experiences excessive and uncontrollable worry about future and past events, excessive concern about performing competently and significant self-consciousness. Individuals with anxiety often have negative views about their ability to cope with stressful academic situations. Students with anxiety problems tend to show lower levels of academic achievement, self-efficacy, and self-concept. Anxiety reduction requires the work of students, teachers, and parents. Anxiety often makes students misunderstand or exaggerate the importance of the situation. If the condition is not managed properly negative aspects can occur.

 When it comes to learning and performance at school, anxiety can be facilitative and disruptive. All students are anxious at times; some more than others; some pervasively and chronically. When anxiety is disruptive, it is associated with a host of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional problems. When the problems are pervasive and severe, they may be diagnosed as anxiety disorders. However, most students who have problems and appear or indicate that they are anxious are not disordered and should not be treated as having a psychopathological condition and, in most instances, it is difficult to differentiate causes and effects.

Effect of Anxiety:

• A student with high anxiety can fall behind academically because he or she is distracted and has impaired verbal working memory skills when anxious.
• Anxious children often have to exert more effort to perform well because they’re trying to manage their anxiety while executing a task. If untreated, anxiety can persist for years but proper interventions can decrease anxiety and improve learning.

MPKP Training Methodology teaches the necessary skills to cope up with Anxiety. We focus on :

• Providing an open-communication classroom.
• Teach and discuss positive coping skills with students.
• Allow students opportunities to practice and apply coping.
• Model positive ways to prevent and manage anxiety.
• Model positive self-talk and praise students for their use of positive coping Skills.
• Problem Based learning as a proven method to increase students’ levels of positive metacognition.

In addition, we work collaboratively on developing the following skills in Students:

• Self-regulation — The ability to calm self and manage frustration.
• Thought stopping/thought interruption — The ability to short circuit the cycle of negative thinking by refocusing attention on a replacement thought.
• Thinking traps — The ability to recognize common patterns of thoughts that can increase anxiety and learn how to manage these thoughts.
• Social skills — The ability to take another person’s perspective and conversation skills.
• Executive functioning — The ability to think before acting and to follow sequential steps to complete a task efficiently.
• Flexible thinking — when anxious, flexibility of thought can help avoid episodes of becoming upset when things don’t turn out as expected.