As Andre Zayas lay on the hard gym floor, the 14-year-old struggled to clear his mind of his myriad burdens. He ached for a friend who was recently shot to death. He worried about finding a job to help his single mother pay the household bills. And in just a few hours, his project on the 1930s was due in humanities class, and he had not finished.
The teenager, among two dozen Fenway High School freshmen arrayed in a semicircle beneath a basketball hoop, breathed deeply as a stress-reduction trainer instructed them on how to relax. New Age music floated through the gymnasium.
“Allow intruding thoughts to pass like clouds in the sky,” said the trainer, Rana Chudnofsky, her soothing voice rising just above a whisper. “Take a mini-vacation from your day.”
Mind-body relaxation training, already popular among prep schools, is seeping into public high schools as principals and teachers worry about students’ ever-mounting stress. In the most wide-scale effort in the state, specialists from Massachusetts General Hospital have begun fanning out among urban and suburban high schools to help students cope.
“The kids are stressed out at every school, in every environment,” said Marilyn Wilcher, senior director of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General. “At Exeter [High School], the stress is getting into Harvard. At the inner-city schools, it’s whether they’re going to be alive the next day.”
In addition to deep breathing and visualizing their goals during gym class, the Fenway High students learned muscle-relaxation techniques and how to focus before a test by staring at the second hand of a clock for 30 to 60 seconds. In Needham, Massachusetts General is tracking a group of sophomores and juniors for a study measuring the impact of the training on students’ anxiety and self-esteem.
While high schools have always been pressure cookers, students say their stress is fueled by increased competition to get into selective colleges and by parental expectations. Some face life-and-death anxieties as violence penetrates neighborhoods.
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Overtaxed and overcommitted students have more trouble understanding what they are supposed to be learning, said Paul Richards, principal of Needham High, who is at the forefront of the school stress-reduction movement. Students become so distracted and unable to focus that their academic performance plummets, he said.
“The culture drives this kind of anxiousness and this focus on the right grades and the right college,” Richards said.
At Fenway High, gym teacher Julio Avila invited the stress trainer to work with his freshmen last week because he sees students struggling with a host of non-academic stresses.
“They have jobs after school,” Avila said. “They have to baby-sit their siblings. They’re concerned about safety.”
Zayas, the freshman, was grateful for the opportunity to escape from his troubles. But relief was temporary.
“I’m still stressed,” he said before leaving for his next class. “All the weight is on my shoulders.”