Don’t Worry, Be Smarter!

You knew that worrying can trip up your students (or you!) on a math test—that’s not a surprise. But now a University of Nevada researcher thinks he can explain how: Worrying ties up precious space in your working memory, leaving less of it available for juggling numbers.

Psychologist Mark Ashcroft asked people to do arithmetic problems such as two-column addition while remembering six letters at the same time. “Everybody makes more mistakes on the math when they’re trying to hold six letters in their memory, but people with high math anxiety break down more,” he says.

One of his graduate students asked test subjects what they were thinking while struggling with this task. “They had more stray thoughts like ‘I’m no good at this, I hate math,’” reports Ashcroft. “They spent time thinking about their anxiety.”