By David Robson
19 June 2015

Sweaty palms, a racing pulse, that choking
feeling in the back of my throat: nothing sends
fear into my heart like the need to perform
maths in public. Even the simple task of
splitting a restaurant bill brings me out in a cold
sweat. No matter how hard I concentrate, the
numbers somehow slide from my mental grasp,
and I’m left with a looming shadow in place of
the answer.
Even looking at a shop receipt can send
some people into a panic
You know those dreams where you suddenly
realise that you’ve forgotten all your clothes?
That’s what it feels like. My dirty little secret is
all the more embarrassing, considering that I
have a university degree … in mathematics. Yet
somehow, advanced calculus in the privacy of
my own room was a breeze compared to simple
arithmetic under the gaze of others – or even
remembering my building’s security code.
So I was relieved to discover that I am not
alone in my “maths anxiety”, a surprisingly well-
studied psychological condition. It’s exactly
what it sounds like – a fear of numbers. Luckily
for me, my fear was largely limited to on-the-
spot mental arithmetic; once maths became
less about numbers, and more about letters, I
was fine. But for many it casts a serious
shadow over their school days, meaning that
psychologists are now devoting themselves to
the causes and consequences of this strange
numerical “phobia”.

A maths test activates the brain’s “pain
matrix” – the regions that light up when
you injure yourself
To begin with, psychologists could only measure
math anxiety with questionnaires asking
participants to rate their feelings as they
approached different kinds of maths-related
tasks – from opening a maths textbook to
entering an important exam. Although it has
been mostly studied in young children, it seems
that it can affect university students and adults
too; even looking at a shop receipt can send
some people into a panic. More recently,
however, they have been able to study
physiological responses too. They have found
that although maths presents no real danger, it
has a very real, physical response, including the
release of stress hormones like cortisol , which
are characteristic of the fight or flight response.
One study even found that anticipating a maths
test activates the brain’s “pain matrix” – the
regions that might light up if you had injured
yourself.

It’s not clear why maths arouses so much fear
compared to geography. But the fact that
there’s a right or wrong answer – there’s no
room for bluffing – might make you more
worried about underperforming. Even so, like
many fears, it’s often unfounded – and may in
fact damage your chances of performing well. In
2012, for instance, brain scans of children in
America aged seven-to-nine found that those
who feel particularly anxious about maths not
only show greater activity in the tonsil-shaped
amygdalae regions, which normally deal with
threat; the fear also dampened firing in the
prefrontal cortex (behind the eyes) – a region
that deal with abstract processing. This is
thought to reduce short-term “working
memory”, meaning the children found it harder
to concentrate and think about the sums at
hand. One interpretation is that the anxiety itself
is choking their ability to perform the sums.
That seed of fear may come from many sources
– but one thought is that teachers may be
spreading their own anxieties to the next
generation. Children can sense if an adult feels
nervous and begin to think they should be on
the lookout for danger too – along these lines,
teachers who feel nervous about their own
mathematical abilities do tend to have more
anxious pupils. Cultural expectations may also
be to blame – girls may be more likely to catch
maths anxiety (particularly from female
teachers), perhaps because of stereotypes that
girls are naturally not very good at maths. Your
genes, meanwhile, might predispose you to
anxiety more generally – making you more likely
to respond aversely to maths as well as any
other kinds of “threat”.

Whatever its origins, once the seed of the fear
takes root, it may grow by itself : the more
anxious you feel, the worse you perform, the
more you shy away from maths and the more
you worry when you face it again. And the
psychologists suggest it may have serious
consequences. People with maths anxiety were
less likely to understand statistics about the
apparent risks of genetically modified food, for
instance; by the same token, it’s easy to see
how it could lead to a serious misunderstanding
of real dangers like smoking or over-eating.
Psychologists often treat anxieties with aversion
therapy – in which you face your fears to try to
learn to cope with the anxiety. Unfortunately,
continued maths classes don’t seem to numb
the dread. But there may be other solutions.
So-called ‘expressive writing’ may be one
simple measure – many studies find that
articulating your fears can loosen their hold on
you. One class asked to write about their fears
before an exam improved their average grades
from around a B- to a B+. Others are looking at
subtle ways of reframing the fear – encouraging
children to see a test as a challenge, not a
threat, for instance, and explaining that their
fear doesn’t not necessarily reflect a natural
bad ability.

Could reframing my fears offset the panic the
next time I am asked to split a restaurant bill?
I’ll certainly give it a go. If not, there’s always
my usual crutch – my smartphone calculator.

www.bbc.com/future/story/20150619-do-you-have-maths-anxiety