As Andre Zayas lay on the hard gym floor, the 14-year-old from Dorchester 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.
Next to him, Chanel Peguero closed her eyes and imagined graduating from high school in four years with a scholarship, the only way she would be able to afford college. The honor roll student cannot wait to escape her home in a South End housing development where her sleep is punctured by sirens, gunshots, and arguing adults.
The teenagers, 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 minivacation from your day."
Mind-body relaxation training, already popular among New England prep schools, is seeping into public high schools as principals and teachers worry about students' ever-mounting stress. In the most widescale effort in the state, specialists from Massachusetts General Hospital have begun fanning out among urban and suburban high schools, including Boston, Needham, and Brookline, 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 MGH. "At Exeter, 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, MGH 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 gain admittance to selective colleges and demanding parental expectations. Others face more life-and-death anxieties as violence penetrates their neighborhoods.
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.
The principal of the high-achieving affluent suburban school 20 minutes west of Boston drew national attention last year after he ended the publication of the honor roll in the local newspaper, to reduce pressure on students.
On top of peer pressure, some students believe that parents contribute to stress. They complain of "helicopter parents" who obsessively monitor their children's attendance and grades via a website set up by the school. Students said their teachers routinely field calls from parents inquiring about tests and assignments before the students have a chance to log on and check their grades.
"Definitely our generation of parents are following our kids more closely than our parents did," said Wendy Perlman, whose son is a Needham High junior. "But most parents are very well meaning and aware of overstepping their place. It's a very small minority that are actually driving the kids crazy."
Perlman urged her son to sign up for the a monthlong stress-reduction workshop in January as part of the multiyear Benson-Henry/MGH research. The institute is paying $35,000 for the Needham study through grants. Other schools, which are not part of the study, pay $2,500 to $25,000 for workshops.
Some parents and educators fear that the focus on stress might erode students' drive to achieve.
But a Benson-Henry study in the late 1990s of students in South Central Los Angeles middle schools showed that relaxation training boosted grade point averages and test scores and improved student time-management skills and attendance.
Preliminary research results in Needham will not be available until April, and it is unclear whether the exercises are sticking.
For Danny Blackman, stress comes in bursts. The 16-year-old Needham junior is enrolled in accelerated and Advanced Placement classes and hopes to attend Cornell University, his father's alma mater. His weeknights and weekends are consumed by school clubs: speech and debate, mock trial, and Model Congress. Then there are his SAT prep classes and driving school.
Blackman says his stress festers when multiple academic deadlines clash with his extracurricular activities, as happened one night last week when he had to study for an AP history test on the Roaring '20s and write an English paper on "The Great Gatsby." But instead of tapping into the relaxation techniques he has learned, Blackman powered through the night without a break.
"The thing about relaxation is it takes 10 to 20 minutes to put on some weird CD or do a breathing exercise," he said. "I honestly don't want to take the time to do that when I have to finish an English paper."
But classmate Jenny Huezo-Rosales, 16, said she regularly uses the relaxation techniques to help her decompress. She has trouble focusing on school work at home because she shares a room with six siblings. Now, her siblings know to leave her in peace when she turns out the lights, lies on her bed, and shuts her eyes for 10 minutes.
At Fenway High, a small Boston public school where most students are college-bound, gym teacher Julio Avila invited the stress trainer to work with his freshmen last week because he sees students struggling with a host of nonacademic stresses.
"They have jobs after school," Avila said. "They have to baby-sit their siblings. They're concerned about safety in their neighborhoods. And they don't have the luxury of having parents who drive them to swimming and gymnastics programs after school."
Zayas, the Dorchester teenager who worries about helping his mother pay the bills, said his stress is manifesting in a regular nightmare that his mother, on her deathbed, asks him to look after his younger brother and cousin. He says he wakes up crying in the middle of the night.
"When you have no father in the household, you have to realize that you're pretty much the alpha male," he said. "You have a responsibility. You have people that you have to look after."
During the workshop, Zayas filled out a worksheet of stress warning signals, checking off nearly all the symptoms. He bites his nails, sleeps a lot, and has frequent headaches. He lashes out by yelling or swearing, avoids friends, and has a hard time making decisions.
He 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."
Tracy Jan can be reached at tjan@globe.com.
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