SAT season is coming, and with standardized testing often comes test anxiety for teens. That jittery, nervous feeling you’ve probably felt before a test is normal and can even provide motivation to study. But test anxiety can balloon into a feeling of constant worry and dread, making it hard for your teen to focus on studying or anything else in their life. If your teen doesn’t have the tools to cope with stress, it can become chronic, and prolonged stress can damage teens’ mental and physical health.
Why is academic stress a problem for teens?
While the focus of school should be learning, test scores and grades are often treated like the actual goals of school, especially by parents and teachers. Teens who are under pressure at school and at home to perform well academically may tie academic performance to their self-worth and to their future life satisfaction. Poor or even average academic performance can become a sign to a teen that they’re worthless and have no future, and even when they do succeed academically, they may see it as simply meeting expectations.
If your teen can’t see their successes as anything but ordinary and failure means they themselves are a failure, they lose perspective, and test performance can become a major stressor.
What does test anxiety look like in teens?
For a teen with test anxiety, success can feel temporary, and failure can lurk around every corner. This tying of self-worth to performance can create constant stress for teens, and this constant, underlying fear of failure can impact their mental and physical health.
Chronic academic stress and test anxiety can cause stomach problems, aches and pains, hopelessness, panic attacks, mood swings, headaches, irritability or rage, racing heartbeat, shortness of breath, unshakeable sorrow, sleep changes, the inability to focus or even begin things like homework or tests. Paired with perhaps one of the most concerning symptoms, the desire to self-harm, all of these symptoms make it even harder for your teen to succeed in school.
Why do teens experience anxiety differently from adults?
Teens are growing in body and mind, and the part of their brain responsible for fight-or-flight, the amygdala, is often triggered when your teen is stressed. Teen brains are still adjusting to adult responsibilities and are sensitive to their surroundings, meaning they still need support in processing their experiences and managing their responsibilities. Your teen may not yet have the life skills that help them cope with stress, so their responses to stressors can be huge. Meltdowns, outbursts, total shutdowns, and prolonged emotions about seemingly minimal experiences are all ways teens can respond to stress, and these experiences can be hard on everyone, especially your teen.
While your teen isn’t responsible for the ways their brain gets triggered by test anxiety or academic stress, they can take responsibility for their responses by learning ways to calm their nervous system and process their feelings and experiences. By teaching your teen DBT skills that help with managing test anxiety, you empower your teen to navigate the experience of life with a growing mind.
DBT skills for parents of teens with test anxiety and academic stress
Mindfulness helps to quiet anxious minds
Dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) can quickly and effectively reduce test anxiety. Its approach to stressful life experiences, with a particular focus on mindfulness, helps teens stay present and focus on the task at hand, releasing self-judgment and allowing anxiety to come and go without allowing it to derail their day.
The following exercises can develop skills of staying present, directing the mind, participating, holding off on self-judgment, focusing on one thing at a time, and preparedness, all of which can aid in making test-taking easier for your teen.
What skills: Observe and Participate
Observe is a DBT skill for anxiety where you focus on experiencing a situation fully, with awareness but without judgment. The observe skill asks you to guide your mind and :
- Notice what’s happening around you, what you feel, and what you’re thinking.
- Let your thoughts and feelings show up and pass you by instead of trying to avoid hard feelings or sustain happy ones.
- Describe to yourself what you’re experiencing. Try to stick to the facts of what you’re observing, recognizing your experience may not be a full reflection of the situation. Don’t judge yourself or label thoughts or feelings as good or bad; let them simply exist.
Participate is the “outer work” in comparison to the Observe skill’s “inner work”. Participate encourages you to:
- Focus your mind and actions solely on the activity in front of you.
- Respond spontaneously to what’s happening around you without judging yourself or letting self-conscious feelings change what you choose to do.
How skills: One-mindedly, Non-judgmentally
The How DBT skills help your teen focus and release judgment. They can be used side-by-side with Observe and Participate skills, creating a strong foundation for mindful focus on the moment.
- One-mindfully encourages your teen to do one thing at a time, focusing their whole mind on the task at hand.
- Non-judgmentally encourages your teen to notice when they’re passing judgment on themselves or others. When they notice they’re starting to engage with negative self-beliefs and judging themselves, they can remind themselves of the neutrality of experiencing feelings and having thoughts.
Being anxious about test-taking is, for example, neither bad nor good. It is a state of being, one that is safe to sit with, and they don’t have to try to get rid of that feeling. Having a high test score doesn’t make your teen a better person, and needing to learn more before accomplishing the academic success they hope for is not a bad thing. It is simply a state of being in the process of learning and is norm.
When to use mindfulness skills for test anxiety in teens
Mindfulness requires practice, and your teen will need to use mindfulness regularly to help them when, say, SAT time comes around. If you regularly remind them of the DBT skills that can help them, encouraging them even in stress-free times to practice using mindfulness skills, they’ll be able to use those skills even when stressed.
Teens who use mindfulness regularly can show:
- Better self-awareness
- Higher self-acceptance
- Less worry and less attention paid to negative self-beliefs
- Fewer mood swings
- Increased resilience, even when they are disappointed or stressed
Emotional regulation can support your teen as they prepare for tests
Mindfulness is just one pillar of the DBT environment; distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness also provide your teen with DBT skills for managing the stress of adolescent life.
Emotional regulation can help your teen experience difficult emotions like disappointment, fear, and frustration without allowing those feelings to overwhelm them. For test anxiety, the Cope Ahead DBT skill can be particularly helpful in guiding your teen in managing their emotions during a moment of high stress.
Cope Ahead
Cope Ahead is a rehearsal for a stressful situation. Encourage your teen to try the following steps:
- Visualize the experience of taking a test. Consider the thoughts, feelings, and actions your teen might experience before, during, and after the test.
- Choose different ways to cope with what will happen before, during, and after the test. Write down these coping strategies in detail.
- Visualize the experience of taking the test again, using the coping mechanisms in the visualization to help manage the feelings, experiences, and urges to act that come up. Encourage your teen to allow themselves to succeed with all their coping skills, even if the worst-case scenario happens.
- Spend some time relaxing after this exercise to calm the body and mind.
DBT programs can provide support for teens with test anxiety or academic stress
DBT offers a wide variety of life skills that you can help your teen practice so they can let go of academic stress and engage in learning without the distraction of constant anxiety.
While independent practice of DBT skills can provide some support, finding a comprehensive DBT program for your teen can offer them longer-lasting, holistic help in developing the life skills they need to leave test anxiety and academic stress behind them.
How to find a teen therapist to help with test anxiety
When you find yourself searching “best teenage therapist near me” to find a comprehensive DBT program to help your teen, make sure you choose a teen therapist that offers DBT-A with both individual and group counseling as part of the DBT program, as well as on-call therapist phone support for your teen when they’re between sessions.
At Suffolk DBT, the 24-week DBT-A program was developed with teens and their families in mind, with empathetic therapists teaching skills to everyone in the family so your teen can be supported both in therapy and at home.
Your teen’s therapist will create a confidential space for your teen to open up, encouraging them to explore their thoughts and emotions to help get to the root of their anxieties, then use DBT skills to create the change they need to develop a life that feels fulfilling and balanced.
When your teen is ready to take the brave first step of trying therapy, our therapists are ready to connect with them, helping them develop therapy goals that align with the direction they want their life to take.