Alex
When our children are struggling with anxiety or managing learning disabilities, it can feel instinctual as parents and caregivers to jump in and fix it, to tell them it’s fine, and to use the skills we have as adults to stop those struggles. While this might be the easy route in the long run, it does little to teach them proper coping mechanisms and little to set them up for success. So what can we do instead?
Alex
Welcome to Graduating Anxiety, the podcast that gives you an inside look into the academic challenges that students struggling with anxiety face. I’m your host, Alex Merrill. Today I’m so excited to welcome Ellen Braaten to the show. Ellen is a director of the Learning and Emotional Assessment Program at Massachusetts General Hospital, a renowned child psychologist, associate professor at Harvard University, and author of Bright Kids Who Can’t Keep Up. Among other things, Ellen has stressed the importance of parenting and caring for our children using empathy and validation. Today, Ellen and I discuss her thoughts on diagnosing and managing anxiety in children, psychological testing and more.
Alex
Ellen, welcome to graduating Anxiety. Tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.
Ellen
So I am a child psychologist who specializes in neuropsychology, meaning that I evaluate kids for learning and attention issues and things like ADHD and dyslexia and the autism spectrum. And my research has been in the areas of processing speed. I am at Massachusetts General Hospital, and I’m also associate professor at Harvard Medical School, so I do research and clinical work both.
Alex
Now, Ellen, you’ve authored a few books too, as well, one of which is titled Bright Kids Who Can’t Keep Up, and in this book, you talk about kids and teens who struggle in the area of cognitive functioning called, what you just mentioned, processing speed. Could you just tell us a little bit about what that means and what that’s all about?
Ellen
Yeah. So processing speed, as it’s defined most simply, is how long it takes you to get something done in a specific period of time. And I became interested in this subject about ten years ago or so, and I had been practicing in psychology for ten or 15 years by that point. And I was seeing kids who were relatively weak in processing speed. Meaning when we look at their test results, they’re very slow or relatively slow in the ability to kind of, like, execute a task, it’s not the ability to sort of think quickly, but it’s the ability to sort of execute something. You know what you want to write, now you’ve got to get it on paper. And so there are tests that we can use to look at that. And the kids who are weak in processing speed, regardless of their diagnosis, whether they had ADHD or Dyslexia or anxiety, even I found that the ones with the slower processing speed in their profile just didn’t respond to different sorts of remediation. And I started to think that, well, maybe there’s something with processing speed that cuts across diagnoses. So that’s what got me interested in it was just sort of a hunch.
Alex
That’s interesting that you put it, how processing speed cuts across diagnoses. I’m wondering what your thoughts are on the sort of the overlap, I guess, or the connection between processing speed and anxiety.
Ellen
So we do know from my own research, and I should go back to that. Processing speed, let’s go back 15 years or so, just used to be thought of as a kid with ADD, sort of that non-impulsive, non-hyperactive, more inattentive subtype of ADHD, but they just weren’t paying attention, couldn’t get stuff done, all of that. And my research has shown that that’s somewhat correct, that about 50% of our sample, 50% to 60% have ADHD. What we didn’t necessarily expect to find is that there were high rates of slow processing speed and other disorders. And anxiety is one of those disorders that’s very highly correlated with slower processing speed. And for the most part, it’s kids with slow processing speed and anxiety that are most at risk. We don’t know whether or not that’s a chicken or an egg sort of situation where, is it the anxiety that causes somebody to be slower? They’re cautious, they’re overly anxious about doing something well, so they don’t engage as quickly in it? Or is it that when you have slower processing speeding and that’s sort of like a neurological way of you being within the world, does that make you more at risk for anxiety? Because you’re a little bit behind, you really don’t, you know, you’re just one step behind everybody else, which can make you anxious. Our current theory is that there’s probably some kind of bi-directional thing happening here that, yes, you sort of have this natural disposition that maybe anxiety and this cautiousness can bring a true slow processing speed to some people with anxiety. And that natural way of being causes you to be more anxious and it can be sort of a circular process for a lot of people with anxiety.
Alex
So it sounds like you’re seeing that actually, the anxiety is the thing that develops first, and then the lower processing speed is sort of a result in the learning process. Is that accurate or not?
Ellen
It’s not quite. I think the typical thing is it’s a lot easier to identify anxiety at a younger age. The way we measure processing speed is with paper and pencil tests. So when I’m talking about, in our research, processing speed, we’re using, I don’t know if your listeners are familiar with the Wexler Intelligence Scale for Children, but on that intelligence scale, a lot of people who have had large evaluations can see that there’s a processing speed index. So when we’re talking about that, we’re talking about correlating these sorts of paper and pencil tasks. Your ability to do something like taking your assignments down from the board, those sorts of detail-oriented tasks that need to be done quickly. So that’s a little bit harder to discern in kids until they’re about four or five or six years of age. Anxiety, though, can often be determined fairly early in life. Like, we know that kids who are much more inhibited from a very early age have increased risks for anxiety. So we can kind of see it first, but I don’t really know if one comes before the other.
I should also say too that there is another group of kids with anxiety who have very quick processing speed and that can also be troublesome for kids who have anxiety, meaning that they are overachieving. There’s sort of a sweet spot for anxiety and for processing speed. But too much anxiety is bad. Too little anxiety is also bad. Anxiety keeps us motivated. It helps us know where to focus. It helps us sort of plan ahead. Like, oh, if I don’t do this, I’m going to be really anxious about that. So if you don’t have enough of that, you’re not going to get things done. It’s sort of the same with processing speed, but too much makes you rush, makes you but too little also makes you always behind.
Alex
That’s really interesting, the correlation, the sweet spot. I love that. Do you have any theories on where anxiety is coming from for these kids? Are there factors that sort of contribute to the development of that condition?
Ellen
Well, I think that processing speed, it happens along a continuum, like a bell-shaped curve and probably before, let’s just say 20 years before now, 25 years before now, having slow processing speed did not necessarily place you at risk for increased anxiety because the environment was a lot slower paced. Now, kids with slow processing speed who also have anxiety, the world that we live in can fuel the pressure, which can fuel the anxiety, which can make what could be just sort of a normal weakness. We all have strengths and weaknesses, but this normal weakness in processing speed now becomes something much larger than it was in the past because there are so many pressures on kids to get things done, so many things that we have to keep track of. Keep in mind that it’s much more of a significant problem for kids with anxiety. I feel like kids with slower processing speed are really kind of like the I call them the Buddhas of our society. They’re the thoughtful sort of people, the deep slow thinkers who benefit from walking in the woods, or just kind of hanging out on their bed and looking at the ceiling, kind of thinking about things that can also be really good for anxiety. That’s not something that really is valued in our society and it’s not something that we necessarily teach kids how to do anymore.
