Stress in teens can be reduced with a single 30-minute online training session designed to foster a growth mindset and see the body’s reaction to stress as positive, scientists say.
A study with more than 4,000 high school and college students suggests that the intervention could be an effective and low-cost treatment for adolescent stress.
The focus is on seeing stress as an opportunity for growth and interpreting physiological responses, such as a career heart, as potentially improving performance.
“We’re trying to change teens’ beliefs about stressful situations and their responses to stressful situations, ”said Dr. David Yeager, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author of the study. “We’re trying to get teens to realize that when you do something hard and your body starts to feel stressed, that could be a good thing.”
Mental health problems are on the rise in teenagers in the UK, with rates of likely mental health disorders among young people aged six to 16 increasing from one in nine (12%) in 2017 to one in six ( 17%) in 2021 and there are long waits to access services in some regions.
The concept of “growth mindset” has become widely popular in sports psychology and education. The latter approach adds a new element, in which people are encouraged to reinterpret the physical signs of stress as benefits; for example, a beating heart can help mobilize energy and increase the flow of oxygen to the brain.
During a series of six randomized controlled trials, Yeager and colleagues demonstrated that the 30-minute intervention appeared to have potent and lasting effects on physiological responses to stress, academic performance, and mental health.
In one trial, 166 students received the intervention or a placebo session in which they learned about the brain. They were then surprised by a request to deliver an impromptu speech about their personal strengths and weaknesses in front of peer evaluators who had been trained to create an unfavorable atmosphere by sighing and wrinkling their foreheads. Those who had received the intervention had lower stress responses, based on heart rate and other physiological measures.
In another experiment, the intervention was shown to influence academic performance nine months later, with a 14% higher chance of students passing classes at the end of the course. In a final trial, teens who had done the training reported lower levels of general anxiety a few months later.
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Yeager said the approach went against the “widespread ethics of self-care” which often seems to see stress as solely negative and suggests that people “go to do yoga or have a chamomile tea.” “This is a way to distract yourself, but it doesn’t help you deal with the underlying cause of stress,” he said.
The findings are published in the journal Nature.