Anxiety can impact your life in a variety of ways. While many people tend to focus on how it affects relationships, it can also have a negative impact on your career or your school performance. Whether you’re in high school, college, or continuing your education later in life, anxiety can wreak havoc on your efforts. 

Understanding exactly how anxiety affects school performance can make it easier to recognize when you need some help. With that in mind, let’s take a look at four ways anxiety can affect your performance in school and what you can do about it.

1. Poor Self-Care Practices

Self-care is important for everyone, including younger students. Unfortunately, anxiety often makes it difficult to focus on self-care. Anxious and negative thoughts can completely distract you from things like basic hygiene, let alone finding ways each day to de-stress and do things for yourself. 

Poor self-care can cause a vicious cycle in your life and can negatively impact your school performance by making you even more stressed about the amount of work you have to do. When you see your schoolwork as a heavy burden, you’ll convince yourself you don’t have time for self-care, which perpetuates the negative cycle even more.

2. Poor Performance

Perhaps the biggest thing you’ll notice because of your anxiety is how you might struggle in your classes. Anxiety makes it difficult to focus on what you’re supposed to do. It’s easy to get distracted by negative thoughts and all the what-ifs from so much uncertainty. Unfortunately, when you’re unable to focus on your school work, you will not learn the necessary information to get things done effectively or efficiently.

3. You’ll Procrastinate

Because anxiety makes it hard to focus, it’s not uncommon for people struggling with it to push their responsibilities aside. You might lack the motivation to get things done because you’re just too anxious. Or, you might have every intention of coming back to your projects later. But, as you start to see deadlines looming on school work, your fears may kick into high gear, and those negative thoughts might tell you there’s no way you can get things done. Not only will those thoughts cause you to procrastinate further, but they’ll eventually contribute to poor performance.

4. Strained Relationships

Going to school isn’t just about academics. It’s a time to meet new people, develop lasting relationships, and join clubs or organizations that mean something to you. Anxiety can do a lot of harm to the relational side of school, keeping you from important social growth.

Anxiety aims to distract you with negative thoughts, and that can take away from meaningful, healthy relationships. It can make you withdraw from friends and activities you might typically enjoy. You might also develop some social anxiety and worry that people don’t like you or are judging you somehow.

Combatting the Impact of Anxiety

Do any of these situations sound familiar? If so, you don’t have to continue struggling with anxiety for the rest of your school career. The first step in treating anxiety is recognizing there’s a problem and getting to the underlying cause of it. Speaking to a therapist makes that easier. 

If you’re struggling with anxiety and it’s affecting your school performance, don’t hesitate to reach out for more information about anxiety therapy. Together, we’ll discover what’s triggering your anxiety. From there, we can work on techniques to manage your symptoms and help you overcome the lingering effects of your anxious thoughts. In doing so, your performance will improve, and you’ll end up being able to enjoy school more than ever.