17 lies your anxiety is telling you

If you suffer from anxiety you’ll know all about the pesky little lies the condition can tell you when it takes hold.
Lies we can sometimes believe every single day, for years.
But you’re not the only one suffering and these thoughts are very common.
Here’s 17 lies your anxiety is telling you.
You cannot be trusted to remember anything
So you must continue to write every single solitary thing down. In case you forget something world-ending.
Everyone is staring at you. And judging you
You’ve worn something new to work, you’ve tried that new hairstyle, and everyone has noticed. And not in a good way.
Is your grandmother not picking up the phone? Best go out and buy something black
Because she’s not just at her Bridge Club. Or pottering round in the garden like she does every afternoon.

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These palpitations are a heart attack. You are having a heart attack on the toilet at work
Because as if exiting this mortal coil wouldn’t be bad enough, everyone will talk about you for months afterwards.
You need to get used to having panic attacks, because they’re not going anywhere
Because there’s obviously no way of you learning to control them.
Your friends are fed up of you
They are totally over how much you worry about the smallest, silliest things. 
You? Go on a date? You’ll just embarrass yourself
Why on earth would anyone want to listen to what you’ve got to say anyway? Just cancel it and stay at home.

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All your hard work is ruined…
Because you didn’t go to the gym for a week or made one mistake at work.
You’ve got to go out and meet a new group of people tonight. You won’t manage to hold this together
They’ll think you are an absolute fool.
You need to achieve all your life ambitions in the next 12 months
You just do. You can’t possibly get things done the year after next. No way.
You didn’t send that email before you left work. You’ll be sacked without a second thought first thing in the morning
You had better lay awake until 3am worrying about that.

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The person you’ve been seeing for a while hasn’t text you back for four hours. It’s all over
They’re bored of you. They have met someone else far better looking. They’re almost certainly not just a bit busy.
It’s all you.
Even though everyone just laughed at your joke, they still think you’re an idiot
They’re just laughing to appease you. The minute you go to the toilet they will start talking about how dumb you are.
In a relationship? You will mess it up
Because you spend so long worrying about stuff. Which will drive your other half to insanity.
Heaven forbid you might find someone that actually understands or you might get better.
Even if you get the courage up to talk to someone, they will think you are crazy
No chance you might stumble across someone that feels the same or gets where you are coming from.
You are crazy, let’s be honest
Because nobody in their right mind would spend that many hours worrying about a text message.
Or worrying about if the chicken in the fridge is going to kill them.
Or that all their friends will soon stop talking to them for no reason.
This is how you are going to be forever
There’s no help and no way to get your head round the amount  you worry.
So just sit there some more and worry about the worry. Don’t consider talking to someone. Just worry some more.

Source:http://metro.co.uk/2015/11/22/18-lies-your-anxiety-is-telling-you-5436226/

For Some, Math Anxiety Improves Performance

Anxiety associated with being asked to perform math is often viewed as a contributing factor for poor scores.
New research, however, finds that math anxiety — nervousness and discomfort in relation to math — may improve performance among motivated children.

In two studies, researchers Zhe Wang, Ph.D., of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Stephen Petrill, Ph.D., of Ohio State University, and colleagues found that a moderate level of math anxiety was associated with high math performance among some students.
Researchers found children who reported they valued math and embraced math challenges, appeared to use math anxiety to enhance their scores. For those who are low in this kind of math motivation, however, high math anxiety appears to be linked with low math performance.
“Our findings show that the negative association between math anxiety and math learning is not universal,” say Wang and Petrill. “Math motivation can be an important buffer to the negative influence of math anxiety.”
The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
While some children might be anxious about math because it is extremely difficult for them and they feel threatened by it, others might be anxious about math because they want to perform well.
The researchers hypothesized that different underlying motivations for these two groups may have different consequences for math learning behaviors and performance.

For the first study, the researchers looked at data from 262 pairs of same-sex twins. The children, about 12 years old on average, completed measures of math anxiety and math motivation.
They also completed six tasks aimed at measuring math performance, tapping skills like representing numerical quantities nonverbally and spatially, calculating with fluency, and using quantitative reasoning in problem solving.
The results indicated that there were no differences in math anxiety and math motivation according to age, but they did show that girls tended to have higher math anxiety than boys.
When the researchers investigated math anxiety and math motivation together, a complex pattern of results emerged. For children who reported low levels of math motivation, increases in math anxiety were associated with poorer performance.
For children who reported high math motivation, the relationship between math anxiety and performance resembled an inverted U shape: Performance increased with anxiety, reaching peak levels with moderate anxiety. As anxiety increased beyond this midpoint, math performance decreased.
To ensure that these results were robust, the researchers conducted a second study with 237 college students. Again, they found that math anxiety was related to poor math performance among students who reported low math motivation, while students who reported high motivation showed the inverted-U relationship between anxiety and performance.
“These findings suggest that efforts that simply aim to decrease math-anxiety level may not prove effective for all students,” says Petrill.
“Although math anxiety is detrimental to some children in their math learning, motivation may help overcome the detrimental effects of math anxiety. In particular, for children highly motivated to better learn math a moderate level of math anxiety or challenge may actually prove efficacious.”
Future research will examine the real-time physiological changes that underlie the complex relationship between math anxiety and math achievement.
Source: http://psychcentral.com/news/2015/11/05/for-some-math-anxiety-improves-performance/94443.html