A Surprising Lesson | @caroline-cavanagh | The Anxiety Alchemist

12 Oct 2026 · 0 min

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In this brief talk, Caroline Cavanagh describes a classroom exercise she uses during school assemblies to illustrate how the way a question is framed directs attention. She asks children to count all the green objects they can see, prompting a flurry of responses. When she then asks how many blue objects are present, a child points out that they were never instructed to look for blue items. This moment highlights how people often overlook information that isn’t explicitly called attention to, underscoring a broader lesson about the power of framing in perception and, by extension, anxiety management.

And there's a lovely exercise that I've done when in the past I've been into schools and run assemblies and say to all the kids, right, count to 5, look at all the green things in the room, how many can you see? And they all start shouting out numbers about how many green things they can see. And then I say, okay, but how many blue things are there? And there's always that one kid that goes, oh, but Miss, you didn't tell us to look for blue things. But then you see the penny start to drop.