Anxiety in Children and Adolescents: Effective Strategies to Calm the Anxiety Storm and Overcome Excessive Worry – Sherianna Boyle

You know that the symptoms of anxiety can feel like a powerful storm to kids and adolescents…fearful and negative emotions raging inside them lead to overreaction, fretting, blame and overwhelmed outbursts.

This heightened state of reactivity can make anxious children and adolescents difficult for you to reach, keeping them from achieving positive outcomes in therapy, and preventing them from effective learning from school.

This recording will allow you to calm the reactivity of anxious kids and adolescents and provide you with the strategies and techniques you need to help them let go of the things that worry them, handle anxiety inducing conflict, and overcome excessive fears related to gossip, school, bullies and more.

Left unaddressed, children and adolescents with anxiety will face life-long consequences on their mental and physical health.

You’ll leave with the clear, concise and hands-on guide you need to confidently and capably help kids and adolescents face and appropriately cope with the anxiety damaging their lives.

Key Benefits of Watching:

• Flexible tools to recognize the anxious child and differentiate anxiety from normal fears
• Techniques that draw out internal feelings of anxiety in the silent sufferer
• Reduce stress response related reactions that can interfere with therapy and learning
• Concrete strategies that target school-based anxieties
• Coping skills to help kids handle conflict and learn to let go

1. Engage anxious kids with a supportive communication approach that encourages them to openly express and discuss their feelings of anxiety.
2. Communicate how breathing strategies can be used to bring physical calm and reduce reactivity in anxious kids and adolescents.
3. Characterize how logical and natural consequences can be used in school disciplinary situations to address problem behaviors without increasing anxiety.
4. Teach kids with anxiety to implement self-soothing coping skills to help them calm down when they are upset, anxious or worried.
5. Establish how co-occurring disorders like depression impact the treatment of childhood anxiety.
6. Identify how clinical and non-clinical providers might inadvertently contribute to anxiety.

Identify Anxious Kids and Adolescents

• The value of worry?
• Behavioral patterns and physical symptoms
• Recognize the “silent sufferer”
• Identify causes and contributing factors

When Anxiety Overlaps Other Mental Health Conditions and Issues

• Anxiety as a “gateway problem”
• ADHD
• Trauma
• Depression
• Adjustment disorders
• Shyness and introversion
• Being over-extended
• Undiagnosed learning disabilities
• Paralysis of perfection

Practical Steps for Alleviating Anxiety:
Techniques to Calm Reactivity and Build Resiliency

• Trigger identification – emotional memory and reactivity
• Harness the natural mindfulness of children
• Exercises to calm reactivity
  • Simple yoga for kids
  • Breathing strategies to bring physical calm
  • Ground with the senses
• Exercises that use the body to ease anxiety
  • Self-observation
  • ”Make Way for Movement”
  • ”Boosting Boundaries”
  • Muscle relaxation
• Coping and self-soothing skills
  • ”Letting Go Rituals”
  • ”Heart Opening Visualization”
  • How to handle conflict
  • Nourish relationships and gratitude
• Research limitation and risks

Simple but Effective Complementary Approaches

• Exercise and physical activity
• The role of nutrition in anxiety
• Sleep routine and ritual
• Gratitude exercises

Empower Kids to Overcome School-Based Anxiety

• How to counter negative rehearsal
• Tips and tactics to address:
  • Social anxiety
  • Peer pressure
  • Bullies and gossip
  • Separation anxiety
  • Meltdowns
  • Test anxiety
• The environment of anxiety
  • How you might be contributing to anxiety
  • Build a supportive environment
  • Transitions: planning for the “unplanned”
• It’s a family affair – working with parents
• Discipline without increasing anxiety
  • De-escalate interactions with anxious children
  • How to use logical and natural consequences