Have you ever felt anxious and stressed when your math teacher asked you a question? Or while doing your math homework? If this is the case, you may have experienced math anxiety. The sensation of being extremely nervous when confronted with basic mathematics.

You are not alone if you have experienced math anxiety. Many people become extremely nervous when confronted with a situation requiring them to perform basic mathematics. Math anxiety is more than just being afraid of doing math. Nervousness is a natural reaction to a frightening situation.

People who have math anxiety believe they are bad at math and, as a result, dislike math. These feelings cause them to avoid situations requiring them to do math. Adults with math anxiety frequently struggle with math in their jobs and in their daily lives. Adults with math anxiety are less likely to show interest in, enter, or succeed in careers related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

When and how the Math anxiety first appears?

Math anxiety, according to scientists and educators, appears when children begin to learn complex mathematics (such as algebra). This would imply that young children (who do not yet perform complex math) do not suffer from math anxiety. Recent research, however, has revealed that some children as young as six years old report feeling anxious about math.

A research was conducted on children of grade 1 and 2. The results showed that children who were more anxious about math performed worse on the test. According to this study, math anxiety and the relationship between math anxiety and math ability develop in very young children.

Researchers have two theories about how math anxiety develops. One theory holds that children who struggle with numbers when they are young are more likely to develop math anxiety when they start school.

Another theory is that math anxiety develops in children when they are exposed to certain types of social situations that influence their thoughts or feelings. This means that what other people say or do affects the child’s emotions, opinions, or behaviors. One study found that teachers with high math anxiety were more likely to have students with lower math achievement at the end of the school year. According to this study, the way the teacher acted had an effect on the students’ math ability.

How to help people with Math anxiety?

One of the primary goals of understanding what causes math anxiety and how math anxiety affects the brain is to find ways to help people who suffer from math anxiety and, eventually, to prevent it from occurring.

Some researchers have developed tools to assist people who suffer from math anxiety. These tools are known as interventions. An intervention is a tool or programme that is given to people in order to help them improve or get better at a skill. For example, based on research showing that writing down thoughts and feelings beforehand can make people feel less nervous when taking tests, researchers have developed interventions.

The researchers proposed that if children write down their thoughts and feelings, those feelings would not occupy working memory while the children took a math test. As a result, the researchers conducted an intervention in which they asked children suffering from math anxiety to write about their concerns. The researchers discovered that when students wrote about their math concerns, their math test scores improved.

A different group of researchers discovered that if college students with math anxiety practiced breathing exercises before a math test, they felt calmer and their test scores improved.

These intervention studies provide scientific evidence for how we can help people who are afraid of math. These research studies is very promising because it shows that people who suffer from math anxiety can be helped; they are not expected to suffer from math anxiety for the rest of their lives.

There is still much work to be done to understand how math anxiety develops, why it affects only some people, and how we can help people who have it. For the time being, whether you are experiencing math anxiety or not, discuss it with your classmates and teachers. It is critical to talk about your emotional reactions to math because this is the first step toward reducing the potentially harmful effects of math anxiety.