The Nature of Anxiety
Reframing Anxiety as Information, Not Obstacle
Anxiety is not an unnatural state to be resisted. It's a signal—a leading indicator that a current process is no longer serving you and needs to change.
But here's a distinction worth making: anxiety is not the same as fear. We aren't anxious when we're running away from the tiger. We're in fear, yes, but we know exactly what to do—run. Anxiety is what we feel hiding under the bed when the monster is coming and we don't know what to do. Anxiety is the response to uncertainty, not danger itself.
Many of us struggle with this, particularly students navigating the perceived zero-sum landscape of college admissions and the increasing pressures placed on them by educators and parents. When we misunderstand the function of anxiety, we remain limited by it.
The Evolutionary Purpose of Stress
There's an evolutionarily positive reason why we have cortisol. When the tiger roars, we need to run. Stress focuses us on one thing: leaving the path. The people who didn't have that response were eaten.
However, in our unrelenting information economy, that natural function has become overwhelmed. The problem isn't cortisol itself—it's that constant information flow has exceeded our capacity for organizing our own thinking. Stress can turn up the dial enough to make you more focused, but too much anxiety destroys you.
The Air Traffic Controller's Dilemma
Consider test anxiety as a concrete example.
The human brain can only process a very limited amount of information at once. While older theories suggested we could hold about seven items in working memory, updated research led by Nelson Cowan and others indicates the actual capacity is closer to just three to five chunks of information.
During a high-stakes exam, if those slots are filled with thoughts like "I'm nervous," "don't be nervous," and "you're running out of time," you have a situational learning disability. But students often assign this to a different narrative—one about not being smart enough or not being able to do well on tests.
Think of a stressed air traffic controller. If he tries to land seven planes on four runways simultaneously while answering frantic phone calls from pilots saying they're running out of fuel, he becomes paralyzed. He cannot land seven planes at once.
His first action must be to let the phone ring and land that first plane. If he does so, he now has six. Let the phone ring. Let the anxiety be.
The Strategy Trap
We get many students from other test prep programs who are looking for more strategies. We have to disabuse families of the idea that there's any strategy they need. What they need is to accept anxiety and work with the limitations of their brain.
Adding more test-prep tricks is the equivalent of the controller picking up another phone line:
- Increased Cognitive Load: Complex new methods consume the few remaining mental slots available for actual problem-solving.
- Paralysis by Analysis: Instead of simplifying, these strategies become additional planes that the student must juggle.
The act of resisting anxiety actually robs you of the capacity to hold information and act on it. It holds space in your working memory—often a lot of space—reducing your ability to take on the next action.
Gaps in Understanding and the Role of Literacy
Language itself creates gaps in understanding. "I don't understand something" takes up space in working memory, and these unconscious gaps exhaust our capacity to focus on the next word. They build anxiety without us even realizing it.
Critical literacy categories aren't something more to remember. They're a set of strategies for simplifying learning and reducing cognitive load. They level the playing field for students with learning differences and supercharge learning for neurotypical kids.
The literacies offer opportunities to exercise independence when anxiety has you paralyzed:
As soon as you let go of trying to change your anxiety, you have an opening. You have one pathway for doing the next thing.
Embracing the "Next Step"
The solution to anxiety is not to reduce it. It's to develop habits that make anxiety unnecessary.
This is challenging because the first step is to accept it—not try to change it, not try to take action out of that anxiety, but instead take action out of a deliberate learning process that you know works.
The magic is that anxiety goes away. Not because you fought it, but because anxiety is a response to not knowing what to do. When you have a process, you always know the next step. The condition that created the anxiety no longer exists.
- Resisting anxiety consumes the cognitive capacity needed to hold and act on information.
- Accepting anxiety—letting the phone ring—clears a pathway for the next action.
- Organizational and prioritization tasks can be managed by embracing the anxiety and doing the next thing, because by doing something, your mind is relieved of the pressure to act when you don't know what to do.
It is a philosophy of learning for everyone, and a powerful one—powerful enough to get a kid who largely didn't attend elementary school, failed forward in high school, learned nothing in college, and still managed to get his PhD without knowing how to read when he started. If it works for me, it can work for everyone.
At Vault Prep, we focus on the critical literacy skills that make learning transferable: comprehension, critical thinking, and problem-solving. If your child knows the material but struggles under pressure, we'd love to talk.
