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Larson designed an intervention especially for younger students involving breathing and relaxation exercises and examined its effectiveness on a group of third-graders. "We had students lie on mats on the floor of their classrooms. They closed their eyes, and we asked them to focus on their breathing, then on tensing and relaxing groups of muscles in their legs, arms, stomachs and so on," Larson recounts. "Some of the kids became so relaxed they fell asleep!" A control group of students at another school received no such training. A study published in the Journal of School Counseling in 2010 reported that the relaxation intervention had "a significant effect in reducing test anxiety."
"We all stress out about tests," says Zach Bennett, a seventh-grader at Charleston Middle School in Illinois who took part in the study. That was three years ago, but when Zach starts to get anxious about a test these days, he still remembers to focus on his breathing the way Larson taught him. "It helps make the nervousness go away," he says, "and it helps me to realize that the test is really no big deal."
Paul is the author of the forthcoming book Brilliant: The New Science of Smart