How Can I Help my 16-Year-Old with Anxiety?
“How can I help my 16 year old son with anxiety?”
It is important that you understand your son’s anxiety. It is absolutely normal for him to feel anxious when he faces challenging situations, like an exam or meeting new people. In those cases, anxiety is an adaptive emotion because it fits the situation he is facing. Anxiety becomes a problem (and ultimately a disorder) if he feels anxious for six months or more or if his anxiety is so intense that it disrupts his daily functioning. If this is the case, it may be a good idea for him to see a psychologist specialized in anxiety in teenagers.
Talk with him about his anxiety: Ask him how it feels like in his mind and his body and discuss what makes feel him anxious (an exam, speaking in public, meeting new people…). Next, help him to recognize when he is anxious (e.g., his hands feel clammy, his heart races, his breathing becomes shallow…). The next step is to come up together with relaxing techniques that he can use whenever he recognizes those anxiety signs. These techniques can be: breathing deeply 10 times, counting to 10, visualizing a place or a person that makes him happy, or splash very cold water on his face or wrists. The idea is that whenever he feels the anxiety coming, he will use one of these tools. He should use the one that works best for him. As you can tell, the goal is not to eliminate anxiety but to help him manage it.
Very often when teenagers get anxious, they avoid the situations that make them anxious. So, for example, they avoid going to a birthday party or sitting an exam. At the beginning, this is a great short-term solution, but long-term avoidance makes anxiety worse because never confronting the situation makes it even more scary. If this is the case of your son, help him to take baby-steps to confront the situation he feels anxious about. The message you should give him is that every time he confronts the situation that makes him anxious, the anxiety will get milder and milder.
Finally, it is important that you validate your son’s anxiety, and you make him feel safe and heard but do not amplify it. Your message should be: “I know you are anxious and that is OK and I am here to help you get through this”.
Have a look at these articles as well:
What Are Your Thoughts on Medication for Teens?
How to Help a Child with Anxiety
How to Face the Exam Season: When Anxiety Runs High
I hope this information helps. Do get in touch with me if you want to discuss it further.
I wish you and your son all the very best.
Love,
Ana
