Teenage Anxiety

Children can feel anxious over events or something in their environment when coping with teenage anxiety. They can experience mental and physical symptoms such as increased heart rate, sweaty palms, stomach cramps, and persistent thoughts. These anxieties can lead to sleepless nights, desire not to go places, oppositional behavior, repetitive patterns, and withdrawal. When anxiety is persistently high, a professional should be sought out for advice and counseling. If the anxiety is situational, then parents can use other tools to help their children cope with it.

What Is The The Worry Spill. Worries start out quite honestly and can grow into overwhelming thoughts. A child with teenage anxiety may worry that he will forget to take his homework to school, and before he knows it, the feeling spills into something else such as forgetting his lunch and although he has never forgotten his lunch before it will overtake his thoughts. In these cases the worrying begins to take on a life of its own. Thus, containment is the only answer!

So how do you contain worrying? It’s very important for people to visualize a worry spill. Counselors often draw out an Issues Map shaped like the United States, for example, with different lines separating different issues. For a child, the map might include their homework, chores, band, friends and family. Basically anything the child believes is an issue in his life at the moment. Once the Issues Map is drawn, take a different colored pen and decide when and where the worrying started. There is usually a starting point. It could have been on the day when homework was due or an evening when their mom and dad had a fight. Put a big X on the spot to show the starting point. Next,talk about how worries spill over and start to become new worries. Then take a marker and draw the worry spreading over into other areas on the Issues Map. By the time you are done coloring in the map, it is evident that the worries have became out of control.Now you have a diagram for the child to understand and it will help him to realize what happens when this

teenage anxiety

occurs.

About containment. Discuss how worrying or anxiety is a helpful energy when you focus it on solving a particular problem. For instance, the example of how can I feel assured that I will remember my lunch? The solution might be to place a sign by the front door that states, “Remember your lunch.” If you spend time problem solving and then following through with solutions the worries will often go away. Once you have the original issue solved, the other issues will tend to deflate in their thoughts.

Now For The Worry Box. Some children live with a great deal of stress if they suffer from teenage anxiety. They often worry over school or they fret over sports and have concerns over friends and family. They begin to feel overwhelmed. To help these children cope,explain to them that sometimes their “emotional cup” gets full. Thus, when a parent asks for a chore to be done, these children can easily break into tears or even burst into a rage. Parents feel as if they are “walking on eggshells” when children get at this state. They often don’t realize how easy it is to tip the emotional cup over with a simple request. Your childrens worries are important to them, and when children have too many worries, they can become cranky and even have trouble with sleeping.

A simple way to help relieve your child of teenage anxiety is to help them define what’s bothering them and then put their worries into a literal box. Say, “I understand that your worries are important to you but they are also overwhelming sometimes. Your worries can sometimes make you cry or get you angry and sometimes you lose sleep over them. I want to help you by writing your worries down and then we will place them into a box. When you have new worries you can just add them to the box. When the worries feel too heavy, I want you to know that I will carry them for you. I can even keep them overnight for you. I will take good care of them and when you want them back, you can have them back. I am your parent and I love you so I will be happy to do this for you. I can handle some of your worries when you cannot.Would that be ok with you?”You then help your child write their worries on a piece of paper. Try the ‘I feel… when… because…” formula. A good example might be “I feel afraid when I go to bed because there might be something under my bed.” Then place the written worry in the box. This process allows children to let go, while at the same time feel safe. It’s symbolic buy it can show your child that they are not in this all alone. Sometimes the children never comes back to pick up their worries.

Try A Parent-Child Journal. Opening up communication with your child is also very important to consider when dealing with teenage anxiety. If you find the talking-listening routine too much for now, try a parent-child journal. Get yourselves a journal,then write an entry on the first page describing the purpose of your journal. Write something like, “Sometimes talking about your worries is difficult. I know it is for me at times. I am hoping that this journal will help us to communicate about difficult things until we feel more comfortable talking about them with one another. You will not get into any trouble for anything you write down and you will not be expected to talk about it later. You are free to talk about anything that you choose to talk about”.

You can open the journal with this example: “I sometimes worry about… and this is how I cope with that worry.” If you have good communication skills, you can sit down with your child and explain that the purpose of the journal is to open up communications between each other and reduce their teenage anxiety. Once you have written your entry, place the journal under your child’s pillow and explain to them that they may ask or talk about anything that they wish and when it is placed in a designated area that you will read it and write a response for them to read. Wait patiently for that response. Once you receive your child’s entry, write back thoughtfully and timely expressing your thoughts clearly and without blame.Be as understanding as you possibly can, after all you are the adult here. Take your child out for a “date” or spend some alone time and talk about whatever they wish. Slowly but surely you’ll find that the pages of your journal activity will come to life verbally, however, never push beyond your child’s boundaries. Pushing for an answer can lead them to shutdown and stop all communication, so be careful and most of all be patient.

These three tactics will help to moderate anxiety, and have been proven very helpful when parents use them carefully. It is always important to understand as the parent you model calm behavior and problem solving. Talk your children through your techniques for coping with stress and anxiety. If you are not good at handling your own worries, get some help for yourself and share your discoveries with your children. Stress is a natural part of being human, but decreasing stress and