Learning to relax: Evaluating four brief interventions for overcoming the negative emotions accompanying math anxiety

• Four behavioral and one nutritional intervention for mitigating math anxiety compared
• High math-anxious underperformed on timed math task relative to low anxious peers.
• Focused breathing technique reduced anxiety amongst high math-anxious participants.
• Focused breathing aided math test performance amongst high math-anxious participants.
• l-theanine supplement mildly reduced anxiety but did not aid math test performance.

We examined the potential effectiveness of four brief interventions, three behavioral and one nutritional, for helping high math-anxious college students regulate negative emotions immediately prior to a time-pressured arithmetic test. Participants with low versus high math anxiety performed a timed arithmetic task after practicing one of three short-term breathing exercises promoting focused attention, unfocused attention, or worry, and after consuming either 0 or 200 mg l-theanine. Overall, participants with high math anxiety underperformed relative to those with low math anxiety. This effect, however, was largely alleviated by a focused breathing exercise, which increased rated calmness and enhanced performance on the arithmetic test amongst those with high math anxiety. l-theanine supplementation showed only minimal effects. These results provide insights into the attentional mechanisms involved in regulating the negative emotions that lead to testing underperformance, and suggest that focused breathing exercises can be a useful, practical tool for helping address the negative impacts of math anxiety.