The sun hasn’t even revealed the slightest hint of setting on a day so highly anticipated…before the small footsteps of gremlins, ghosts, goblins, (and whatever characters the latest Disney movie hysteria has created, including an endless swarm of princesses) come chanting at your door. Halloween, in all of its bi-polar glory of tricks and treats and haunts and happiness, brings sugar-rushed roadrunners scavenging the streets with countless bags of candy dressed creatively in costumes, all in the name of unforgettable fun! Ha-ha, if you’re like me and my little pack of children, the previous concoction of words might describe your experience perfectly. Others, I know, would much rather leave behind the candy craze for the most frightening night of the year. Spotlights swirl through the nighttime sky indicating the next haunted-house thrill or corn-maze scare. Fear is exactly what they are looking for. The rush of blood through their veins, the pounding heartbeat in their chest, constant shaking of the muscles and deafening shrill of their screams. They want nothing more than an encounter with anything that will scare “the life out of them.”
Although Halloween can satisfy the anticipation in both the young and old, the cautious and crazy, I am finding the seats in my practice being occupied with those whose fear has worn out its welcome long past this one day of the year. In fact, anxiety and worry, both rooted in fear, combine to create many of the disorders I am treating. They leave my clients distressed, overwhelmed, frantic, irritable, and helpless. Anxiety is a tense emotional state that occurs when you can’t predict the outcome of a situation nor guarantee that it will be the desired one. Although worry is a necessary function for our survival as it serves as a mechanism of protection--giving us the ability to avoid danger, hold back, appraise the situation, minimize the risk, and prepare for a better outcome—it can easily spiral out of control, over-extend our nervous system, hi-jack our minds, and even cause long-term physical damage. The rate of clients seeking treatment for their anxiety is on a constant rise.
Children battling with worry and anxiety will often stay below the radar of the adults around them because their symptoms might not interfere at home or in the classroom, but rather are internalized. Anxious children spend their days enduring great distress over things that their peers don’t even notice. In fact, their wiring has them seeing danger when it’s not even there. Fueled by an active imagination and trying to piece together an explanation for how the uncertain world works, children can easily become highly cautious, overcorrecting for the possibility of any danger.
In nearly every case, you will find that anxiety involves a distortion or overly exaggerated version of a story that puts feelings in charge. Your job is to help your child identify the mistakes and come up with a more realistic, scientific version that puts your child’s rational side back in charge. Some of the following ideas come from the book Freeing Your Child from Anxiety by Tamar Chansky, Ph.D., and are frequently used in my practice to help manage anxiety.
1. The Power of Suggestion. Thoughts influence how we feel and what we do. The “worry brain” makes us feel scared just by suggesting risk or threat. So when your child says, “I’m scared because I think someone might break into the window,” you can say, “Yes, anyone thinking that might feel scared. ‘Worry brain’ is using that power of suggestion trick on you—you’re scared because you had the thought, not because it’s true.”
2. Fight All-Or-Nothing Thinking. At the base of anxiety is some risk. The problem is that with anxious thinking the risk is all or none—there are no shades of gray. Help your child to see that the worry brain is turning a maybe into a definite. Identify other situations where your child is able to take risks without a problem.
3. When Estimating Risk, Go with the Facts, Not with Your Feelings. Help your child access his smarts about a situation by working on getting the facts. Have him ask himself: How much of you feels scared something bad will happen? How much of you really believes it will happen? This will help the child see that the risk is low. When the facts are in charge, the child’s in charge. When his scared feelings are in charge, worry is calling the shots.
4. Confusing Outcome with Likelihood. Don’t think about how awful something would be, think about how unlikely. Just because we can imagine how bad something could be, doesn’t mean it’s any more likely to happen. Possibility vs. Probability! The first goal is to get better at estimation, but an even more important goal is to choose where to focus your thinking—imagining the worst vs. assessing the reality of the risk.
5. Anxious Thinking is Future Thinking—Snap Back to the Present. It is impossible to know exactly how things will be in the future, and the element of change is the only thing we can count on. Therefore, trying to predict the future becomes a very anxiety-provoking venture. Every time you “what-if” about a situation, you are trying to predict the future; it’s bound to lead to more worry. In the present we can solve problems, in the future we can just get worked up about them.
As you teach your child the worry tricks that will help him to rewire his anxious brain, he will learn to build in a second, more realistic way of thinking. By challenging what might seem like automatic worrying and fear, he will set in motion a more healthy circuit which will be made stronger and more available each time he challenges his worries. As a parent, empathize with your child, re-label the problem as the “worry machine” or “worry brain,” help them resist and act with their smarts, remind them that just because it’s “possible” doesn’t mean it’s “probable,” and reinforce your child’s efforts at fighting against fear and worry.