Anxiety & Teens
Our teens 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 teens as well as adults whose own stress can be impacted when their loved ones are also struggling. These tools can also be used in combination with therapy or other mental health services.
The strategies that I’ll be discussing will focus on the needs of our body, our behaviors/reactions, and the thoughts that can fuel our 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 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 as a therapist, when we discuss self care activities, responses like bubble baths or walks in the woods can be examples of how you can put that selfcare into place. A bubble bath is setting aside time just for you, saying NO or being unavailable to other things in that moment (screens/pressure), and reducing your stress levels. A walk in the woods is exercise outdoors that reduces your cortisol levels and blood pressure, provides you with new visual experiences, and can boost your immune system and sleep cycle . Both can be incredibly valuable and done pretty consistently.
Strategy Group 1- Your Thoughts
It can be incredibly difficult for some teens to be aware of or communicate the different types of thoughts and emotions they are having while other teens can overshare or have difficulty regulating their thoughts and feelings relative to the situation at hand. The first step here for teens is building your emotional intelligence by working on your daily awareness of the different types of thoughts and feelings you experience. Journaling your thoughts and feelings builds your awareness of them as well as your ability to form them into sentences that you can communicate if you choose. It also creates a step between thinking and sharing all of your current overwhelming thoughts/emotions before you’ve had a chance to process them. Once you see those thoughts on paper it can be easier to identify negative thinking patterns or cognitive distortions and begin to work on challenging them.
If you don’t learn to name your various feelings they can become one overwhelming feeling (like anxiety or depression) that is even harder to address because you missed the opportunity to tackle them at their 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 your feelings seem to take over. So learning to identify all those different feelings, as well as your thoughts, can build your self awareness and in turn, your emotional intelligence. Higher emotional intelligence can help you have better and stronger friendships/relationships, better school performance, and an increased likelihood of life success.
Strategy Group 2- Your Body
Now that you notice your feelings you can begin to notice how they impact your stress response and how they make your body feel. When you notice your stress response activating, you can use coping strategies to stop it and calm your body back down so you can begin to address those negative thoughts fueling it, like in Group 1. Learn your body’s triggers and how to best relax its responses to them. You can learn a variety of calming and relaxation techniques from a therapist, self help books, and online mental health sources.
Parents- when your 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. Having a visual aid for deep breathing can be incredibly helpful. Many smartwatches and deep breathing apps can offer these features.
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. Many therapists can be a great asset in this area and provide encouragement and guidelines in how to best proceed.
Reduce your common unhealthy behaviors. One area that most teens (and honesty 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.
We recommend setting limits on usage for your phones and your devices. There are several apps that can assist with that if you lack the willpower initially. 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, you can choose to set your own parental controls for yourself to at least monitor your usage so you can choose to override it when needed, but it forces you to be more aware of your time and pause your viewing in order to manually override the limit. You can also choose to take a mini or extended social media break from certain apps. Remove them for a certain amount of time so you can focus on healthier and more interactive behaviors for addressing your anxiety.
Also by deleting the app you create extra steps for each time you still decide to search it out or add it back on. Deleting apps consistently allows you to better control your usage on the apps that you aren’t ready for an extended break from because you 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. You 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 teens- remember- this is not a quick fix but a journey to begin. Your self awareness and emotional intelligence grows as you grow and as you build healthier habits for yourself. And parents- remember- when your teen 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 yourself on the struggles they are facing.
Below you can learn more about anxiety and how some of our most common responses to it can actually make our anxiety worse.
What areas does your teen struggle with the most? Leave a comment below for future blog posts.
