Teen stress can be reduced with a 30-minute online workout aimed at encouraging a growth mindset and seeing the body’s response to stress as positive, according to researchers.
A study involving more than 4,000 middle school and college students suggests the intervention could be a cheap and effective treatment for adolescent stress.
The approach focuses on viewing stress as an opportunity for growth and interpreting physiological responses such as a racing heart as potentially enhancing performance.
“We’re trying to change teenagers’ beliefs about stressful situations and their reactions to stressful situations,” said Dr. David Yeager, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin and first author of the study. “We’re trying to get teenagers to realize that when you’re doing something hard and your body starts to feel stressed, that can be a good thing.”
Mental health problems are on the rise among teenagers in the UK, with the rate of likely mental disorders among six to 16-year-olds increasing from one in nine (12%) in 2017 to one in six (17%) in 2021 and in some regions there is a long wait for access to services.
The concept of a “growth mindset” has been widely popularized in sport and educational psychology. The latest approach adds a new element in which people are encouraged to reinterpret physical signs of stress as beneficial – for example, a beating heart can help mobilize energy and increase oxygen flow to the brain.
In a series of six randomized controlled trials, Yeager and colleagues showed that a 30-minute intervention appeared to have powerful and lasting effects on physiological stress responses, academic performance, and mental health.
In one study, 166 college students received either an intervention or a placebo session in which they learned about the brain. They were then surprised by being asked to give an impromptu speech about their personal strengths and weaknesses to peer raters who were trained to create an unpleasant atmosphere by sighing and frowning. Those given the intervention had lower stress responses based on heart rate and other physiological measures.
In another experiment, the intervention was shown to affect academic achievement nine months later, with students 14% more likely to pass courses at the end of the school year. In the latest study, teenagers who received the training reported lower levels of general anxiety several months later.
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Yeager said the approach runs counter to the “widespread ethics of self-care,” which often seem to view stress as uniquely negative and suggest people “go to yoga or drink chamomile tea.” “It’s a way to distract yourself, but it doesn’t help you deal with the root cause of the stress,” he said.
The findings are published in the journal Nature.
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