Why are people anxious about math?

Have you ever felt stressed and anxious when your math teacher asks you a question? Or when you do your math homework? If so, you may have experienced what's called math anxiety. If you've experienced math anxiety, you're not alone.

Why are people anxious about math?

Have you ever felt stressed and anxious when your math teacher asks you a question? Or when you do your math homework? If so, you may have experienced what's called math anxiety. If you've experienced math anxiety, you're not alone. Many people feel extremely nervous when faced with a situation that requires them to do basic math. Math anxiety is more than just feeling nervous about doing math.

Nervousness is a sensible reaction to a truly scary situation. Conversely, anxiety might not make sense. This means that a person can feel anxious even though they know that there really is no reason to feel anxious. In addition, anxiety can cause physical symptoms, such as a fast heartbeat or sweating.

Usually, people who have math anxiety think they're bad at math, and because of this, they don't like math. These feelings lead them to avoid situations in which they have to do mathematical calculations. Children with math anxiety often have poor math skills. Adults with math anxiety often have problems with math in their careers and in everyday life.

Adults with math anxiety are less likely to show interest, enter, and succeed in careers related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Many factors can contribute to or facilitate math anxiety. These factors or enablers may include teachers, parents, peers, and society. Negative experiences of learning math in the classroom or at home can cause math anxiety.

First, the teacher plays an important role in making the class more attractive and reducing anxieties. Good math teachers can create a learning environment in which students have a positive expectation about their learning. Second, parents play an important role in developing or reducing their children's math anxiety. Parental behaviors and relationships with children are very important in this regard.

By talking about the anxieties and fears their children might face, parents can identify any learning problems at an early stage. This could prevent the development of any learning anxiety that students may face later in life. In addition, parents' math anxiety causes their children to learn less math during the school year and to have more math anxiety at the end of the school year. Third, peers play an important role in facilitating math anxiety.

Peers at any stage of learning can have a negative impact on their colleagues, for example, when students may feel inferior to their colleagues when they make mistakes. Finally, society can contribute to the development of mathematical anxiety due to misconceptions about mathematics or to mathematical myths. The pressure of time limits on tests The fear of public embarrassment. The student expects to never know the answers to math questions, so he depends on other people to do the math for him or her.

However, there is still a lot of work to be done to discover how math anxiety first appears, what causes only some people to have it, and how we can help people who have math anxiety. One of the main goals of understanding what causes math anxiety and how math anxiety affects the brain is to find ways to help people with math anxiety and ultimately prevent it from happening. Researchers think that maybe, when people feel anxious, the math anxiety they feel is draining some of their working memory, so they don't have enough working memory left to solve the math problem. First, math anxiety can exist in people who have math skills, even if they don't like math.

Because math anxiety affects many people and is related to poor math skills, it's important to understand when and how math anxiety first appears, what happens in the brain when people feel anxious about math, and how best to help people with math anxiety. Researchers have studied how math anxiety first appears, what happens in the brain when people experience math anxiety, and how best to help people who suffer from math anxiety. Math anxiety affects many people and is related to poor math ability in school and later in adulthood. This study revealed that people with a lot of math anxiety have a less accurate representation of numerical magnitude than people with low math anxiety.

This research is very promising because it tells us that people with math anxiety can be helped, as they don't get stuck with this anxiety for life. They reported that people with a lot of math anxiety have less accurate representations of numerical magnitude than their peers with low math anxiety. .

Shahid Lakha
Shahid Lakha

Shahid Lakha is a seasoned educational consultant with a rich history in the independent education sector and EdTech. With a solid background in Physics, Shahid has cultivated a career that spans tutoring, consulting, and entrepreneurship. As an Educational Consultant at Spires Online Tutoring since October 2016, he has been instrumental in fostering educational excellence in the online tutoring space. Shahid is also the founder and director of Specialist Science Tutors, a tutoring agency based in West London, where he has successfully managed various facets of the business, including marketing, web design, and client relationships. His dedication to education is further evidenced by his role as a self-employed tutor, where he has been teaching Maths, Physics, and Engineering to students up to university level since September 2011. Shahid holds a Master of Science in Photon Science from the University of Manchester and a Bachelor of Science in Physics from the University of Bath.