How to harness our anxieties.

Ways to help ourselves, our teenagers and children feel empowered to deal with our worries and anxieties.

Let’s face it anxiety gets very bad press. The thought of getting anxious is almost stress inducing in itself. However, when we start to look at it differently, more as an opportunity to learn, we can start to feel empowered.

In modern day life stress is more likely to come from low level daily drip effect of anxiety at work, demands of relationships or the intrusion of social media. Although low level, it is still trying to convey to us a message that would be harmful to ignore.

Taking time to reflect on what is at the heart of your stress or anxiety can help. For example, if social media is contributing to feelings of insecurity, then come off it or simply reduce your usage. This can be a fruitful conversation to have with teenagers and, as a family, you could try to do this together, highlighting the benefits.

Another contributing factor to low level anxiety is, ‘What if’ scenarios. This is often known as catastrophising. Although this is not a helpful thought process, it does highlight things that we care about.

Rather than ruminating on this ‘What if’ list, problem solving in small steps through an action plan is always useful. This helps us not only acknowledge our anxiety, but be proactive about it. This has similar connotations to CBT- Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.

In the process of writing it down and creating our ‘Action plan’ we can also decipher whether the worry is hypothetical-one we have little control over and may have been created in our own minds or practical-where we can actually take control and do something about it.

It can be helpful to factor into your day, ‘Worry time’-for example after eating evening meal.

It can be helpful to first of all ‘capture your worries’ by writing them down whenever the worry arises during the day or at night. Then categories it ‘practical’ or ‘hypothetical’.
If practical you can problem solve it with an action plan later, however if it is hypothetical it is a good idea to almost tell the worry you will come back to it later, during ‘worry time’. For example if in the middle of the night you would say to your worry, “I”ll deal with you later”. It is useful to refocus our minds away from our worries, for example by focusing on the present moment. At night this could be the breath, during the day when at work or school/college we could use our 5 senses, sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste-in order to ground ourselves in the present moment. Or simply moving your body and listening to music.
When scheduled ‘worry time’ comes around get out your list and look at the hypothetical worries, the ‘What ifs’ and ask yourself the following questions;

-How do you feel about the worry now, compared to when you wrote to down.

-Did the thing you were worrying about happen?

-If so did you cope?

-Would continuing to worry and focus on it during the day have made a difference?

-What could you be doing now instead of worrying?

In my yoga sessions I discuss with the children reframing our anxieties. The most important message that we teach is that anxiety is normal and part of being a human. It can even be helpful in some situations.

Ultimately when we learn to control our anxiety is when we start to feel empowered.

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