Anxiety-Preteens & teens

Adolescents live in a world that was not like our experiences growing up. We need to acknowledge their unique challenges and build our understanding to help them navigate it. According to the National Institute of Mental Health (NIH) approximately 31.9% of teens in the US have a form of an anxiety disorder. It’s about 38% of teen girls and 26.1% of teen boys. That is a significant amount of youth struggling and untreated anxiety can lead to more mental health concerns. The strategies I will discuss can be great tools for working with pre-teens and teens. These can also be used in collaboration with a student’s therapist or psychiatrist if they are seeing one.

The strategies that I’ll be discussing will focus on the needs of our body, our behaviors/reactions, and the thoughts that can fuel anxiety. All three of these areas should be addressed, but often starting with one small step in any direction can be best as it is the least overwhelming. Don’t look at this list as a checklist to be done at once, but instead as a path to continue on.

The first (and most important piece) is often dismissed, misunderstood, or even ridiculed. Self Care. Self care is not just spa days or hot baths. Self care is about placing the importance of your body’s needs higher on your to-do list and that can be INCREDIBLY difficult for many people. These needs include sleep, nutrition, positive socialization, health, and new or emotionally rewarding experiences. They are the pieces that allow you to build a good mental/physical/emotional foundation for yourself. Self care is more important than merely seeking happiness in a moment, it’s about seeking balance and stability within yourself.

Poor self care negatively impacts our mental health. For example, not getting enough sleep or having a poor quality of sleep is linked to increased risks for anxiety and other mental health disorders. Sleep deprivation can even cause otherwise healthy individuals to develop anxiety symptoms and increased stress responses. Teens typically need 8-10 hours of quality sleep each night. Poor nutrition (highly processed foods and refined sugars) can lead to internal inflammation that is now believed to be able to cross the blood-brain barrier and impact anxiety levels, mood disorders, and depression by signaling inflammation in the brain. Nutritional deficiencies, such as various vitamin deficiencies, can also impact anxiety, concentration, depression, mood, and sleep.

So in a school setting, when you discuss self care activities, you can focus on the student’s sleep the night prior, the impact of their food choices on their energy and concentration, ways they can manage their time to reduce screen use, and how to prioritize school assignments or visualize time management for assignments to reduce overall stress levels.

You can also focus on activities for them to build on outside of school to better balance the amount of sitting and mental focusing they are engaging in during the school day. You can discuss how daily walks can reduce their cortisol levels and blood pressure, provide them with new visual experiences or healthy visual stimulation, and boost their immune system and sleep cycle. Walking is a great form to settle one’s thoughts to more effectively problem-solving current stressors.

Strategy Group 1- Your Thoughts

It can be incredibly difficult for some teens or preteens to be aware of or communicate the different types of thoughts and emotions they are having while others may overshare or have difficulty regulating their thoughts and feelings relative to the situation at hand. The first step here for teens & preteens is building their emotional intelligence by working on their daily awareness of the different types of thoughts and feelings they experience. Power Skills feelings identification activities are a great way to foster this individually as well as socially during group activities.

You can also suggest journaling at home to build their awareness of their thoughts and feelings as well as their ability to form them into sentences they can communicate if they choose to. It also creates a step between thinking and sharing all of their current overwhelming thoughts/emotions before they’ve had a chance to process them. Once they see those thoughts on paper it can be easier for them to identify negative thinking patterns or cognitive distortions and begin to work on challenging them.

If they don’t learn to name their various feelings they can become one overwhelming feeling (like anxiety or depression) that is even harder to address because they missed the opportunity to tackle it at the start. For example, hesitation before it became insecurity or sleepiness before it became irritability and then rage.

The actual issues at hand aren’t always clear when the bodily sensations of one’s feelings seem to take over. So learning to identify all those different feelings, as well as their thoughts, can build their self awareness and in turn, their emotional intelligence. Higher emotional intelligence can help them have better school performance, better and stronger friendships, and an overall increase in mental health.

Strategy Group 2- Your Body

Now that they notice their feelings they can begin to notice how they impact their stress response and how they make their body feel. When they notice their stress response activating, they can use Power Skills to stop it and calm their body back down so they can begin to address those negative thoughts fueling it, like in Group 1. Help students identify their body’s triggers through the Power Skills Triggers sheets and then help them identify how to best relax their responses to them with specific Power Skills.

Teacher and Staff- when your preteens and teens are visibly anxious and stressed, keep the focus on calming their body back down instead of talking it out or rationalizing the situation. Calming the body back down does not have to mean leaving or avoiding the situation, but instead focusing on calming their breathing and getting their heart rate back down to shut off their stress response by using their Power Skills. Using visual aids like the Box Breathing Printable.

This is also where taking care of your body with good sleeping, eating, and activity levels can come into play.

Strategy Group 3- Behaviors

This part can be the hardest because it can mean acknowledgment of our negative behaviors and because it has to include action. It is one thing to desire to change something and another to find the motivation to act on it. The first step is to learn about one’s current unhealthy or maladaptive behaviors. For anxiety this can often be avoidance, procrastination, zoning out on screens, irritability, or self sabotage. These actions are an attempt for us to escape from an uncomfortable or uncertain situation. We have to acknowledge these behaviors as well as the overall situation we are anxious about.

Exposure is a key part of this step. It is learning to tolerate the discomfort of the unknown or uncomfortable situations by gradually pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones safely. Anxiety wants us to escape or reject any encounters with these types of situations, but that just serves to fuel our anxiety more in the long run. It can lead to us feeling anxious about unrelated experiences as well as our anxiety grows. Slowly learning to stay in these reasonably uncomfortable situations and tolerate our body’s anxiety response in the moment can reduce our overall experiences with anxiety in the future.

Help a student identify and then gradually reduce their common unhealthy behaviors. One area that most teens (and honestly adults) have a hard time addressing is screen time. It is a normal part of our lives now but it needs to be balanced. So much research shows the negative mental health impacts of too much screen time- this absolutely includes the time we scroll on our phones, check posts or responses, and get lost watching videos. Most apps are designed to be incredibly addictive and to mentally give us the sense that they are never-ending. Continuous scrolling and instant play videos are designed for us to not only lose track of time on these apps, but to also emotionally feel inclined to continue staying on that app out of a desire to not miss the next thing.

I recommend talking with parents about setting limits on usage for phones and your devices for all ages. There are several apps that can assist with that. Apps like Freedom can limit usage on your gaming computers, AirDroid, AppDetox, or OurPact for phone and app usage, and company parental controls for playstation, xbox, switch, and VR. As a teen, they can choose to set their own parental controls for themselves to at least monitor their usage so they can choose to override it when needed, but it forces them to be more aware of their time and pause their viewing in order to manually override the limit.

They can also choose to take a mini or extended social media break from certain apps- remove them for a certain amount of time so they can focus on healthier and more interactive behaviors for addressing their anxiety. Also by deleting the app they create extra steps for each time they still decide to search it out or add it back on. Deleting apps consistently allows them to better control their usage on the apps that they aren’t ready for an extended break from because they have to decide if it’s worth the effort to download it again for a quick check.

As we reduce our negative behaviors we also have to introduce healthier ones. Learning to be more present in the small and good moments in our day can have a huge impact on the way our brains function in the future. Practicing daily gratitudes, mindfulness, meditation, deep breathing, or grounding strategies can positively alter our brains. Also don’t set goals to be excited all the time, it’s not realistic. We need to be bored and have some experiences feel predictable. When we focus on consistency and structure, we find our overall happiness improves because we don’t rely on extremes for a sense of fulfillment.

The little moments can be the things that make us laugh, the times we allow ourselves to be silly or reconnect with our favorite activities when we were younger, the routines we enjoy by ourselves or with friends, the visuals of our sense of style, etc. We don’t have to find happiness in constant big experiences or purchases, but instead we are more content in life when we have consistent small positive experiences. That way we can truly enjoy those bigger moments in life without feeling addicted to them.

So for preteens and teens- remember- this is not a quick fix but a journey to begin. Their self awareness and emotional intelligence grows as they grow and as they build healthier habits for themselves. And counselors/teachers- remember- when your student is struggling there is not one phrase or action that will solve it for them. It is more about being present, compassionate, firm, and educating yourselves on the struggles they are facing.