First of all, we fully admit the title’s a little clickbait-y – of course there’s a connection between dyslexia and anxiety. In a world where reading is still the way that we facilitate most of our social messaging, business interactions and more, it’s fairly obvious that having less confidence in your reading skills is going to generate a little anxiety. But in a world where there’s growing assistive tech provision in the workplace and a much better understanding of how to create a world that helps people who are neurodiverse have a much more understanding lived experience, sometimes we forget how pervasive reading anxiety can be – and how nervous it can make us during our earliest years.
For many people, dyslexia and anxiety begin their interactions in in the classroom.
The Historic Classroom as a site of Early Anxiety
Although in recent years there has been a lot more understanding of dyslexia and other neurodiversities in school environments, many of us who experienced school before the millennium might have struggled with some aspects of our daily education. Schools were much less clued up on dyslexia and neurodiversity in general, and now it’s best practice across the educational establishment to not put learners in a position where they might feel embarrassed or on the spot. This wasn’t the case as recently as around fifteen to twenty years ago, however, and many people with dyslexia experienced public reading tasks well outside of their comfort zone.
A simple exercise where students have to take turns to read aloud a section in a textbook might have been very simple to eight or nine out of ten of us – but for the ones who have dyslexia, it might have been an experience fraught with anxiety. The same might go for a situation where you’ve had to memorise a passage of text for a presentation, or write something out ‘in your best handwriting’ which wasn’t deemed clear or readable enough. There might have been disappointment at home from your parents or carers who didn’t understand properly why it was that you were struggling. It may have been as simple as working though a workbook or an exam paper at a slower pace than the people studying around you, or even just struggling to take in the instructions for a game you’ve been playing at break or recess.
Dyslexia can have a very pervasive impact on even the minutiae of how we work and play thoughout the school day, and many people who have dyslexia- especially older people, who went through education in an era where there wasn’t as much support available- probably encountered a lot of negative emotions that surrounded the idea of reading.
Stumbling over words, looking hesitant or unengaged in front of teachers, looking embarrassed or incapable in front of peers, being asked to repeat yourself or even being called out on why you’re struggling are all feelings that can lead to a spark of anxiety - and these feelings can grow into classroom reading anxiety, and develop into a lifelong, internalised anxiety around words very quickly. As children and young people, we’re deeply receptive to emotion, and it’s difficult to re-train our brains as adults to appreciate that we simply learn and think differently instead of ‘not being smart enough’. And school is a huge part of our lives – we spend around a quarter of our waking lives in education up to the age of sixteen, and spending a quarter of our lives on what feels like ‘high alert’ has the potential to lead to reading anxiety we can’t shake well into our adult lives.
Some people with dyslexia will have had amazing experiences with inspirational teachers, SENCOs and tutors who have nurtured their skills and made sure that they get the support that they deserve in education. Some people with dyslexia have never gone a day in education feeling like they were struggling for a reason that they don’t properly understand yet, and they’ll have gone on to find jobs and careers in which they excel. And that’s fantastic – but the reality of it is that this isn’t the case for a lot of people, and anxiety triggers don’t take a lot to take hold. Small experiences can colour somebody’s relationship with reading their whole life, and really impact on the careers they think they’re destined for, their exam results, how they spend their leisure time, and more.
Reading Skills and how we perceive ‘Intelligence’
The way we have erroneously equated strong reading skills with intelligence in the past is one of the biggest problems when it comes to busting these early links that our emotions make between the ability to read with confidence and our own self-worth. In the past- and regrettably, here we mean the recent past too, rather than just blaming the Victorians – our world has viewed the inability to read with skill and confidence with disdain. Perhaps because it’s a skill that early education focuses so much on, perhaps because many of us see it as an intrinsic skill to the way that we live our modern lives, it may have seemed to people who weren’t that well informed about dyslexia and literacy differences that difficulty reading at the expected level was a product of laziness or weak academic skills, or just a behavioural failure to engage with education.
No matter how strong your business, art, technological or interpersonal skills were, no matter how creative or inventive or friendly you were - reading is the one yardstick that many people used as a gauge of intelligence until information about dyslexia and other neurodiversities became more widespread. And in some cases it led to many people who have dyslexia feeling ‘written off’ as unintelligent or destined for non-academic futures. Again, this emotional site can foster a site of anxiety for people especially for those told ‘if they didn’t work on their reading skills, they’ll end up in [insert the name of an apparently undesirable manual job here]’. And that might have been a whole lot of us, especially those of us who were in full-time education before the millennium.
Thankfully, modern education has a much better understanding of dyslexia and literacy differences, and we don’t see them as indicative of somebody’s intelligence or worth – although this sadly still doesn’t mean by far that everybody who has literacy differences is able to access the help and support that they need. So it’s easy to look at the landscape in a reductive way, and see that things are better than they used to be, and take solace in that idea that the board-eraser hurling schoolmasters of popular memory have thankfully faded into caricature… yet unfortunately, this is only half of the story, and many dyslexic people’s needs still get left behind. And many still see the classroom as a site of stress and anxiety as it has the potential to push them into situations where their reading skills will be under scrutiny or observed in a whole-class environment. Anxiety and dyslexia walk hand in hand for a lot of people when it comes to school – and it’s important to recognise what the pain points are, and what can be done to alleviate some of the stresses that lead to anxiety in these important learning environments.
Tomorrow, we’ll be taking a closer look at the more modern learning landscape, and what can be done to help create an environment with less anxiety stimuli.