A study involving more than 4,000 high school and undergraduate students suggests the intervention could be a low-cost and effective treatment for adolescent anxiety. The approach focuses on seeing stress as an opportunity for growth and interpreting normal responses, such as a racing heart, as potentially performance-enhancing. “We’re trying to change adolescents’ beliefs about stressful situations and their responses to stressful situations,” said Dr. David Yeager, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin and first author of the study. “We’re trying to make teenagers realize that when you’re doing something difficult and your body starts to feel stress, that could be a good thing.” Mental health problems are on the rise among UK teenagers, with rates of potential mental health disorders among six to 16-year-olds rising from one in nine (12%) in 2017 to one in six (17%) in 2021, and there are long waits to access services in some areas. The concept of a “growth mindset” has become widespread in sport and educational psychology. The latest approach adds a new element, in which people are encouraged to reinterpret physical signs of stress as beneficial – for example, a beating heart can help mobilize energy and boost oxygen flow to the brain. In a series of six randomized controlled trials, Yeager and colleagues showed that the 30-minute intervention appeared to have robust and lasting effects on physiological stress responses, academic performance, and mental health. In one trial, 166 students received either the intervention or a placebo session in which they learned about the brain. They were surprised to be asked to give an impromptu speech about their personal strengths and weaknesses in front of peer assessors who had been trained to create an unsupportive atmosphere by sighing and frowning. Those who had received the intervention had lower stress responses, based on heart rate and other physiological measures. In another experiment, the intervention was shown to affect academic achievement nine months later, with students 14% more likely to pass coursework at the end of the academic year. In a final test, the teens who had done the training reported lower levels of general anxiety several months later. Subscribe to First Edition, our free daily newsletter – every morning at 7am. BST Yeager said the approach runs counter to the “pervasive ethic of self-care” that often seems to view stress as uniquely negative and suggests people “go do yoga or drink some chamomile tea.” “This is a way to distract yourself, but it doesn’t help you deal with the underlying cause of the stress,” she said. The findings are published in the journal Nature.
