Getting Started with Dealing with Anxiety
TEENS and ANXIETY
Audio File of Text
The teen years are important for building a foundation that you can depend on for the rest of your life. As you start the journey on dealing with anxiety it can be a bumpy ride while learning to manage stress and anxiety. You may find some of the exercises will be bumpy while others may trigger some confusing thoughts and feelings. Remember that anxiety itself can be the result of too much stress or not coping well with your daily activities. Don’t forget that anxiety and depression sort of go hand-in-hand together if they’re not managed. Stress is often affected by social interactions during middle school and high school too.
We’ll explore some of those ideas and help prevent higher levels of anxiety that are usually triggered by your thoughts and find coping mechanisms to manage the stress that comes along with being a teenager. Your brain is busy developing a huge network to move information in your brain around and learning to respond to a variety of situations.
Remember your prefrontal cortex in your brain, right above your eyes, behind your forehead continues to develop during your later teenage years and into adulthood. This will help you learn to make a some better decisions and manage the impulsive actions. At times this can trigger overwhelming feelings during this process.
During this time you may be trying to make a decision but afraid of making the wrong decision or saying the wrong thing in front of others. You may even be doubting your own knowledge or your own decision-making.
You might find your body having many different experiences. The shortness of breath, body aches and pains, feeling faint, or excessive worry when feeling stressed. Don’t forget adolescence has so many things going on in your body and brain. These are normal.
Some times the changing body brings even more stress and uncertainty with what’s happening every day. How are my friends going to respond? How are my parents going to respond? Insecurities and uncertainty can bring its own stress and anxiety. At times when we feel overstressed sometimes we reach for unhealthy coping skills. Some may want to isolate and sleep, cry, avoid others, indulge into 24 hour binge gaming online. While others may turn to other unhealthy choices such as smoking, vaping, drinking, or hanging out with risky situations.
Then we add the COVID Pandemic and how this has changed how we all live. Who ever thought you couldn’t go to school for months, or you would have to wear a mask to to go the store. The pandemic brought so many changes that most were not prepared to deal with. Talk about stress!
Then we talk about how teens social lives and education has changed. Extra-curricular school events changed or cancelled – created a lack of social interaction. Then some went back to school while others were online for school. These changes were tough enough but now you still have to deal with normal fears such as giving a speech in your class, or having to turn your dreaded crazy Zoom camera on and everyone can see you!
After completing these topics you should have a healthier toolbox of resources to deal with the challenges you face every day in your life. And remember it doesn’t matter to have a diagnosis of Anxiety Disorder to have stress and anxiety. Don’t worry about the labeling – let’s learn to master the stress and anxious thoughts and learn to be more comfortable within ourselves.
You are on a great journey to start mastering stress and the anxious thoughts!
Preparation, Practice, and Prevention
Preparation – The first section will help you learn ten different levels of your anxiety. They will help you see your current coping mechanisms and the behaviors you use in the high-stress zones. You will create your own chart of symptoms and triggers and also learn to lower your stress levels. This will help you to prevent stress while you develop better-coping tools. Stress will not go away, but the goal is to learn to identify it and deal with it by not feeling overwhelmed.
You will learn how you have adapted to your own environment and see your own behavioral patterns that you developed during your childhood and teenage years. We will help you discover how you want to deal with stress and who you want to be.
We will also show you the roles you have taken on and how they affect your identity. Your developing self-image can be disturbed when these roles are new and confusing, this often results in anxiety.
A clearly defined self-image makes your reaction more flexible when stress occurs and gives you a stronger source of tools.
Practice – This is the most important work of creating new behaviors by learning to interrupt your stress response, giving you options to create a better response.
We often use metaphors that help teach using examples that are usually unrelated but are compared to each other. An example of practice section is like the game of basketball – this is when you practice catching the ball (anxiety) and then developing a moment of decision to decide your next move. In basketball am I going to pass the ball or am I going to go to the floor and dribble. When you catch the anxiety, you have a moment to decide what you are going to do next. You can evaluate it, is it a 10 or is t a 2 on your scale?
Be careful not to work too quickly! The rush to fix it all at once is an anxiety symptom. Practice is the key to part two. This is the game that you practice every day so that when the big stressor comes along, you are ready for action.
Prevention – The third area is prevention. Once we learn to prepare and then practice, we can learn to prevent stress and anxiety. When this begins to happen, you will likely feel more confident and better prepared to handle stressful situations when they do happen.
Don’t be surprised when you still have the initial thoughts and feelings, but now you will have more time and tools to decide how you can respond instead of being stuck with anxiety.
We hope this part will help you learn to reduce the time you spend in distress and anxiety while reducing the anxious moments that weren’t helping you in the past. This makes facing life’s daily stressors more manageable. We know we will continue to have stress – but we are going to learn to respond differently.
This video will allow you to hear from other teens and how stress and anxiety affects their life.