Math Anxiety - The Reason Why You're So Bad At Maths

Math anxiety is something real: Doing maths, or just hearing anything related to maths could make you find hard not only in mind feelings but also in physical feelings of your body. When the time for maths is coming, your heart may start racing, your stomach unreasonably tightens while your palms are about to grow clammy, and so on. The question is that such symptoms somehow make you more anxious, or you have to suffer them because of the math anxiety. Let's find out these unanswerable questions.

What Is Math Anxiety? 

According to another research article, roughly more than 90 percent of adults in the US experience various level of math anxiety. In addition to this research, a study by the Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment found that nearly 20 percent of Americans have to suffer high levels of it - the figures are on the alarm.

If you are a math-anxious person, you shall feel (and believe) that you're totally incapable of facing math-related practices. In some specific situations, there's no real reason to make you feel that way: anxiousness will cause you to freeze despite having the knowledge to do an equation because math anxiety might make no sense. Strictly speaking, there's no exception for anyone. Most people in the world could get a little or deeply affected by math anxiety, regardless of their ages.

While "nervousness" is something happening when you met truly scary things or incidents, "math anxiety" could also bring you a sensible reaction as well. However, the weird "math anxiety" is not simply a matter of feeling nervous anymore - it's obviously a pure science.

The Symptoms And Signs 

If you or your friends/family members are shrinking in "math anxiety", you may want to prevent and overcome the issue. But first, understanding the problem is the most important. The problem needs to be spotted exactly, so let's see how do the symptoms and signs of it look like.

1. Intense emotional reactions: Physiologically, cognitively, and emotionally - that the ways we shall feel about the maths. If you notice a friend start getting angry or panicking during the time your maths class takes place, he seems to be highly math-anxious.
2. Avoidance: You can easily notice a friend with symptoms of math anxiety always try to avoid the math classes on the day he has to do math tests.
3. Negative self-talk: Have you ever thought that you’re naturally bad at the subject and always will be? Yes, once you buy into that idea, you'll no longer have any motivation and give up. Put briefly, reminding yourself that you hate math, you can not do it or you'll never be better at it - is considered as negative self-talk symptom. Those voices pop up in your head many times.
4. Physiological effects: Those can be listed with unusual nervousness, clammy hands, upset stomach, increased heart rate, lightheadedness, and many other negative signs as well.
5. Low achievement: You can get poor grades sometimes, but not all the time. If your performance gets worse and worse day by day due to the lack of confidence, you potentially got the math anxiety. It's safe to say that all other symptoms result in your overall performance

Why You're Still Sinking In Math Anxiety

Have your friends laughed at you after spoke an incorrect answer? Maybe you hated the way your math teacher did; maybe your parents had an unsavory attitude toward math or scolded at you when you got a poor mark. What did trigger your math anxiety and how did you react or feel at that time?

From a very young age, there're many factors that can negatively affect your perspective of math. It takes time to reminisce, but let's try to pay a visit to your childhood and uncover your bad experiences with maths, not only direct but also indirect ones. Here're some major causes of math anxiety that you might find yourself

1. The fear of being wrong has been growing around the clock
2. The strain of math tests and poor grades
3. Negative reactions from parents: Well, such a dilemma for us as most of the parents ain't understanding. Your parents might be not good at math as well, so they told you that you have bad-math genes and you believed them. On the flip side, if your parents had a strictly high expectation on you, a bad mark is gonna be a tragedy.
4. Your teacher influence: In fact, teachers play an irreplaceable role in the class, so the sentiment over math has initially come from them. If you get an inspiring teacher, you will love the math and it's just a piece of cake when the time for math comes.

How To Get Away From It?

The more scared of math you are, the more consequences you get. Needless to say, all you need to do is to face and solve it once and forever. At the moment you really found out what did happen to you, there're a lot of useful suggestions for you to keep maths around without nervous.

1. Find some math apps in accordance with you - it will help a lot. Apps are built for a wide range of math levels of people and will bring you appropriate knowledge and enhance your skills in math.
2. Read some inspiring books about that. You can find stories about math and mathematicians, fun quizzes, tricky math equations, and other fancy stuff.
3. Shape a squad of friends who need to be better at math together. Teamworking never fails to keep us going ahead.
4. Change the way you study math. You better understand than memorize the problems.