A 5-step guide for calming down your worries about your teen
If you slow down to recognize and sort through your worries, you can lead yourself to taking practical action steps or self-soothing strategies to ease your anxiety.
Liking our March Cherish parenting tips so far? Stay tuned for our bonus issue that will include resources to dive deeper into the topics we’ve discussed this month! In the meantime, check out our February Cherish Resources on teen relationships.
Do you stay up at night worrying about what might happen to your teen if they don’t do this or that? You want your teen to grow into a responsible adult. However, over-worrying can keep you stuck in a paralyzing state of mind. Knowing which things are worth worrying about can be a powerful tool in managing your emotional well-being, and giving them the space they need to make their own decisions, face the consequences, and grow. When you can model healthy anxiety management and only stepping in to support when needed, it increases their self-confidence because it tells them you believe in them, and trust their ability to take control of their own lives.
How worrying can hurt relationship with teen:
Worrying does NOT reduce the likelihood that something upsetting will occur. You may believe that if you worried or thought about all the possible scenarios enough that there would be no unwanted news. However, worries are simply thoughts and do not equal prevention. If you allow yourself to feel “safe” in this state of mind, it can prevent you from building trust with your teen and within yourself.
Your teen may be reluctant to talk to you because they’re afraid you might panic and "freak out." Teens want to be more open with you, but usually if they feel you can handle what they tell you by listening calmly. They feed off your energy and your response can be used to gauge how they should feel about the situation. Panic will neither help you or your teen to feel better about a situation. When they come to you, they are likely seeking comfort, validation, or a simple listening ear because they’re already feeling anxious themselves.
You are unknowingly instilling doubt in their minds. When you worry and don’t show you trust your teen, they internalize this into self-doubt. There will be times when your teen isn’t truthful 100% of the time, but it is crucial that you give them the message that you mostly believe in them. Excessive anxiety and wanting to think for them conveys nothing but fear, and self-doubt.
How do you quiet down and manage the worries that you seemingly can’t control, and instead focus on building a more connective relationship? Try following these 5 steps the next time you feel worries slowly creep in.
1. Recognizing the worry
The first step is to recognize when and how your worry is happening. Sometimes when worried thinking has been a norm, it can be hard to differentiate it as “worrying”. Be curious and tap into your body sensations when you are thinking the thoughts. Are you feeling your chest tighten? Are your shoulders rising up? Is your heart beating faster? Once you have identified how worry speaks to you, you can look into where, when, and how you feel it. Look to identify patterns, causes, themes, and a bigger picture for your worry about your teen. This will set you up for the steps ahead.
2. Identifying the worry
You can start to identify the worry by writing or talking about it. Once you call it out and get it out of your head, you will notice your experience starts to change. It distances yourself from your worry and you can start to see it from a more objective point of view. You become more clarified and distilled, and in turn diminish in intensity. It is important to be specific about the fear you have, so that you can begin gathering data in the next step on how likely it will happen.
3. Sorting the worry
Worrying about your teens is normal, but not all our worries are worth our full attention. This is where sorting comes in — sorting between reasonable and unreasonable worries to determine which require time, energy and attention to problem solve. Sometimes our unreasonable anxiety is simply discomfort that we don’t know how to handle just yet. To determine the difference, ask yourself the following questions:
Does my worry statement have the words “never” or “always” in it?
Does my teen have the tools and thinking skills to work through the situation?
Is my worry more possible than probable to happen? (Possible: “My teen will fail out of school.” or “My teen will die in a car crash.”/ Probable: “My teen will need to retake a test.” or “My teen needs to be careful driving, especially at night and in bad weather.”)
Do I lack hard, irrefutable evidence that this worry is reasonable and probable?
Can I prepare my teen for the consequences if my worry were to come true? ****
If you answered mostly YES, you likely have an unreasonable worry in your hands and can benefit from using self-soothing exercises to ease the anxiety. If you answered mostly NO, you probably have a reasonable worry and can work on practical steps that will lessen the risk of it.
4. Practicing self-soothing techniques
Let’s say your worry is more on the unreasonable or irrational side. That’s okay! Our anxious minds like to tell us something is a real threat and we respond accordingly even when there isn’t. The feelings of anxiety can be very overwhelming that you just HAVE to do something about it. Instead of projecting it onto your teen, we suggest trying out the following self-soothing techniques to ease the physical sensations you’re experiencing. When you tell your body that you’re not in danger, eventually your mind will slowly follow suit and believe it too. We love these dialectic behavioral therapy strategies that disrupt your worry spiral.
(A)cknowledge your thoughts and feelings: whatever is showing up inside - feelings, sensations, thoughts
(C)ome back into your body: connect with your physical body by slowly breathing, stretching, pushing your feet onto the floor etc.
(E)ngage with what you’re doing: refocus on the activity you were doing prior to the flood of anxious thoughts by focusing on your surroundings through your senses.
Middle Path: replace “either-or” thinking with “both-and” thinking to make room for compromise for you and your teen
Instead of: My teen will fail school if he spends all his time at basketball → Try: My teen can enjoy playing basketball and focus on improving his grades.
5. Determining and taking action for worry
Now that you’ve determined there are practical steps to take that can help you move past your worry, it is important to brainstorm possible solutions that allow you to balance under and over protection. One approach is to imagine how you'd cope if a worry occurred, and what supports you can create for yourself and your teen. The solutions you come up with should be within your control, and do not impede your teen’s desire for independence or development of essential life skills.
Worry: Your teen will get bullied at school.
Possible action steps to ease worry:
Reach out to trustworthy teachers or counselors who can keep an extra eye out and support your teen.
Ask effective check-in questions to know how your teen is really doing.
Share a personal experience, model or role play mature ways to respond to bullies.
Affirm your teen regularly so that hurtful comments don’t affect their self-esteem as much.
Question of the Week:
For the dinner table, car ride, or whenever you get to sit down with your teen
What is a worry you have that you find difficult to let go of?
Reflection of the Week:
A moment for yourself to slow down, reflect, and Cherish
How can I use my “worry energy” for my teen and channel it to caring for myself this week?
About Cherish
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