How do you know if your child has anxiety?  There are a few signs that are common to teenage anxiety that I have seen in my counseling practice.  This can vary by age.  Older teens can show anxiety,  or hide it better, than younger teens and children.  Some of the signs I see are avoiding speaking up in groups,  avoiding social situations such as sleep overs, avoiding interacting with authority figures such as coaches, teachers, or aunts and uncles they are less familiar with.  Body language can also be a clue.  Anxious teenagers tend to hold themselves in such a way as to make themselves smaller.  They literally make themselves shorter by scrunching down their posture and tend to cover themselves almost as in a defensive posture. Think arms crossed over their chests and avoiding eye contact.  They don’t stand in ways that look assertive.  This may mean they don’t stand or walk with a confident air.

Anxious Behaviors

Anxious teens often decline invitations to do things with new groups of kids or go to places they are unfamiliar with.  They may say they are not interested in going to summer camps, joining activity based school clubs, or field trips because they get uncomfortable in situations where they don’t know what to expect or who they might have to interact with.  Anxious teens often don’t like to be called on in school or singled out even in good ways.  

Anxiety can be overcome with counseling.  The general strategy is to help the teen visualize what they will be doing differently when they are no longer anxious.  A counselor for an anxious teenager will help them develop a very detailed picture of themselves when they are more confident so they can see it themselves clearly in various real scenarios.

Next Steps

The next step is to help them identify very small, but do-able, things they can start doing differently.  This could be, for example, choosing to walk more confidently into the school building one day, even if they don’t do anything else differently the rest of the day.  Then the counselor would build on this one thing and add another positive behavior to it.  Pretty soon, the anxious teenager is noticing other times when they were more confident. They start seeing themselves gaining confidence and trying new things.  

If your have a child with teenage anxiety, counseling is a good idea.  It can help them overcome it more quickly and feel confident to try new things and gain new friends and experiences.  

Gary Watson is a Solution Focused Therapist in Grand Rapids Michigan.  He provides counseling for couples, counseling for teenagers, and adults.  He provides counseling for anxiety, depression, stress, college and work stress, and relationship problems.  For more information, please visit the website at www.turnaboutcounseling.com.

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Does This Sound Like You?

If you are one of these high school students, you may often have anxiety and then start judging yourself harshly for being anxious and not being able to control it. After all, you usually manage to control many aspects of your life and stay on top of things. You may notice having trouble falling asleep because your mind races when you first go to bed. Maybe you wake up with anxious thoughts in the middle of the night and not be able to fall back to sleep.

You may worry because you don’t know what you want to study in college or where you want to go to college. You may not want to go to college but want to have a good career and not know how to make that happen.

If this sounds like you, then you’re in good company. Many high school students worry about not knowing what they want to do with the rest of their lives after high school. Sometimes, you worry because you want to do something meaningful, you just don’t know what that means for you yet.

What to Do About It

There is time to figure it out. Many people change their minds during college and switch majors when they find something they like better. Many people get their degrees in college and end up changing careers to something totally different after being on the job for a figure years. An example is teaching. Many teachers get their Bachelors degree in teaching and get tired of dealing with the stress of teaching after a few years. They end up changing careers or getting trained in something else.

Of course, not worrying about it may not be an option either because telling yourself not to worry is as effective as telling yourself not to think about purple cows. As soon as you try not to think about something, that’s all you think about. So, the trick is to allow your mind to think these thoughts without judging yourself for thinking them or not being able to stop thinking about them. Just accept the thoughts as “that thing I do when I don’t know the answers” and remind yourself that you don’t have to have the answers right now.

Other Strategies

It may help to think about this in terms of “clarity”. You’re trying to gain clarity about your future. You can put your level of clarity on a scale from 1 to 10. If 10 stands for complete clarity about what you need to do and 1 stands for having no idea at all, where are you now? When you can say you’ve gone one number higher, what are some of the things you might know then that you don’t know now? This can be a useful trick to help gain some clarity about your future plans.

Gary Watson is a Solution Focused Therapist in Grand Rapids Michigan.  He provides counseling for couples, counseling for teenagers, and adults.  He provides counseling for anxiety, depression, stress, college and work stress, and relationship problems.  For more information, please visit the website at www.turnaboutcounseling.com.

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