Half-hour online training session helps teenagers deal with academic-related stress: study

A 30-minute online training session lowered teenage students’ cortisol levels, anxiety symptoms and cardiovascular reactivity, according to a series of six studies conducted by American researchers. The training session worked to help students re-frame their stress and approach it with a different mindset. “Our studies suggest that we might not teach adolescents that they are too fragile to overcome difficult struggles, but that we might, instead, provide them with the resources and guidance that they need to unleash their skills and creativity in addressing big problems,” the researchers wrote in their paper. The researchers suggest that the training session could be delivered to a wide population of students to help them confront academic stress. “The intervention is very brief, so could be a relatively easy and low-cost way to support a lot of teenagers, and might be useful as an exercise to do in school,” said Dr. Emma Ashworth, a psychologist and lecturer in psychology at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K. Ashworth was asked to comment by Science Media Centre. She noted that the intervention would not likely be effective in reducing severe, long-lasting anxiety. David Yeager and Christopher Bryan from the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues developed the training, which incorporated two types of thinking about stress: the growth mindset and the stress-can-be-enhancing mindset. The growth mindset encourages students to believe that ability is not fixed, but can be developed with effort. With this mindset, challenging stressors are considered both helpful, in that they present opportunities for learning, and controllable, in that students can develop skills to overcome them. The stress-can-be-enhancing mindset recognizes that the physiological stress response can be positive and harnessed to optimize performance. Read: Do sports help or hinder kids' mental health? Depends on the sport, new study says The studies included American high school and undergraduate university students randomized to take the self-administered online training or not before presenting in-class speeches, taking a timed quiz or while dealing with ongoing academic stress during COVID-19 quarantines. The researchers then performed tests to measure the students’ psychological wellbeing, anxiety symptoms, stress-related cognition, cortisol levels and cardiovascular reactivity. In total, 4,291 students participated in the studies. Students who took the training had improvements in stress-related cognition, psychological well-being and academic stress. Measures of daily cortisol levels, anxiety symptoms and cardiovascular responses to stress (through the Trier Social Stress Test) also improved in students who had the training. “The intervention is not designed to change people’s appraisals of serious, negative and uncontrollable stressors, such as trauma or abuse,” the authors wrote in their paper, published in Nature. “With that said, we did find evidence that the synergistic mindsets intervention can help people cope better with the normal stress of preparing for adulthood in the modern economy, even when they are also facing harmful and uncontrollable stressors, such as economic disadvantage (study 5) or pandemic-related lockdowns (study 6).” Read: Addressing childhood anxiety as early as kindergarten could reduce its harmful impacts

Half-hour online training session helps teenagers deal with academic-related stress: study

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