Maths Anxiety: How to Recognise It and Overcome It

What is maths anxiety?

Maths anxiety is a stress response specific to calculation and numerical reasoning. Under anxiety, working memory — the mental space where we hold the intermediate steps of an exercise — gets taken up by worried thoughts. The result is the classic blackout: the student knew the procedure yesterday, today they cannot find it.

It is neither a rare phenomenon nor an excuse. OECD PISA surveys have found for years that around one fifteen-year-old in three says they feel helpless in front of a maths problem, and the work of Mark Ashcraft and Sian Beilock has shown the mechanism: an anxious student devotes part of their working memory to monitoring their own fear of getting it wrong, and that part is no longer available for holding on to the carry, the sign, the next step.

The point we repeat most often to parents is this: a blackout in a test does not prove that the student "cannot do maths". It proves that, in that moment, their brain was doing two jobs at once — solving the exercise and managing the fear — and only finished one of them.

How does it show up at different ages?

The signs change with age: in primary school the child counts on their fingers in secret and gets stomach ache on test day; in middle school comes the identity sentence, "I'm just not a maths person"; in high school come the blackout in tests and the memorising of procedures that are then carried out without being understood. The mechanism underneath is the same.

Primary school: physical avoidance

At 8-10 the anxiety speaks through the body. Recurring stomach aches on maths days, the hand that never goes up, counting on fingers hidden under the desk because "counting on your fingers is for little kids". The child does not say "I'm scared of maths": they say "maths is boring" and change activity as soon as they can.

Middle school: the identity sentence

Around 12-13 the problem becomes one of identity. "I'm not a maths person", "nobody in our family is any good at maths": sentences that close the question before it has even been opened. This is usually the age at which the break happens, almost always over fractions and algebraic manipulation — the first topics where the "look at the number and do it in your head" method stops working.

High school: the paradox of the diligent student

In high school we often see students who study a great deal and get very little back. They learn procedures by heart as if they were poems, they arrive at the test, and as soon as the exercise is worded slightly differently from the one in the textbook they freeze. The low mark confirms the fear, the fear increases the rote learning, and the spiral continues. These are often students who do very well in every other subject, which makes the block even more frustrating.

If your child's block is not about maths itself but flares up above all under exam conditions, the issue is a different one: we have written about it in this article on Maturità anxiety, which looks at the problem from the parents' point of view.

Why does it happen with maths in particular?

Because maths is cumulative and binary: every topic rests on the ones before it, and a mistake is visibly a mistake, with no middle ground. A gap in fractions in the first year of middle school comes back in equations in the third, and in curve sketching in the final year of high school. The anxiety grows out of that accumulation, not out of a single topic.

In an Italian essay a weak passage can be made up for by the rest. In maths it cannot: $\frac{2}{3} + \frac{1}{4}$ is $\frac{11}{12}$, and any other answer is wrong, in front of everyone if you happen to be at the board. Add to that the timed tests, which turn every exercise into a race, and — very often — one specific episode in the past: a sarcastic teacher, a 4/10 collected at a delicate moment, a change of school with a syllabus further ahead.

The most damaging effect is the avoidance spiral. Someone who is afraid of maths does less of it; doing less of it, they accumulate gaps; the gaps produce further failures, which confirm the fear. After two or three years of this spiral, the problem is no longer "equations": it is the relationship with the subject.

How do we recognise maths anxiety in the first lesson?

A concrete example, seen dozens of times. We set an equation with whole-number coefficients:

The student solves it without hesitating: $3x = 15$, so $x = 5$. Then we move on to:

The same logical difficulty, but now there are fractions. And there are the signs: the pen stops, the eyes move from the page to the tutor's face in search of confirmation, the voice drops. A student with a gap gets the lowest common multiple wrong and carries on; a student with anxiety does not even get as far as writing it down. The difference is valuable, because it tells us where to start: in the first case from the common denominator ($\text{lcm}(4,6) = 12$, giving $\frac{3x - 2x}{12} = 1$ and $x = 12$), in the second from confidence.

This is why in the first lesson we never run a declared "placement test": we set exercises in sequence, starting from the ones the student can already do, and we watch for where the behaviour changes, not just for where the mistake appears.

How do you overcome maths anxiety?

You overcome it by rebuilding confidence before skills: you go back to the last point at which the student is genuinely solid — even two years back — and start again from there with short exercises that end in success. On our maths tutoring paths this phase generally lasts a few weeks, and it changes the relationship with the subject before it changes the grades.

In practice we work like this:

1. Start again from the solid point. If a third-year high school student freezes on rational inequalities, we do not insist on rational inequalities: we go back to numerical fractions, where they can cope, and climb back up one step at a time. It looks like a waste of time; it is the investment that pays off most.
2. Small wins, spread out. Every lesson closes with an exercise the student can solve on their own, with no prompting. The last thing the brain records before the exercise book shuts has to be "I did it", not "I don't understand any of this". Between one lesson and the next we set a few targeted exercises, never lists of twenty.
3. Mistakes as information. We turn the error log from a list of failings into an archive of data: every mistake is classified (arithmetic, sign, procedure, misreading the question) and revisited the following week. When a student reaches the point of saying "that's my usual sign mistake" without embarrassment, half the work is done.
4. Separate reading from calculating. In word problems we first ask them to explain out loud what the problem is asking and which route they would take, without touching the numbers. Take away the calculation and you take away most of the anxiety: and almost always the strategy is there.
5. Reintroduce time in stages. No stopwatch for the first few weeks. Then generous times, then test times. Reaching the timed mock after confidence has been rebuilt, rather than before, makes all the difference.

Since 2021 we have supported more than 630 students across over 35,000 hours of lessons, and maths is by far the subject families contact us about most. The constant we observe: when the path starts again from the right point, the emotional unblocking arrives before the grades do — and it pulls them up with it.

FAQ

The first step

Maths anxiety does not go away on its own, but it is not a character trait either: it is a spiral, and spirals can be travelled in the opposite direction. Tell us about your child's situation: you tell us where they get stuck, we suggest the right tutor and the right starting point. Then book the first lesson — that is where we observe the signs described in this article — and we start climbing back up, one successful exercise at a time.