Anxiety explained…for Teens.
Blog post written by Dr Catherine Pitfield, Child Psychologist (Roots Psychology: Brighton and Hove).
Anxiety is a really healthy normal response, which helps to protect us. By learning more about anxiety and why we experience it, we can see that it is not harmful and find ways to manage the difficult feelings it brings up.
To simplify the brain, we could say it is divided into three sections:
1. The “lower brain”: Houses the “fight or flight” path. It is key for our survival and detecting danger.
2. The “mid brain”: Involved in the development of emotion and stores memories.
3. The “upper brain”: The thinking part of your brain, responsible for planning, organising, thinking about consequences and language.
Our brain will essentially always try and keep us safe and alive, but it can over-respond to perceived threats and danger. The lower brain acts as an “alarm system” in the brain. It scans for danger signals and is capable of turning on the “fight / flight” response. When we are anxious the human brain essentially shuts down, and we can become stuck in the lower part of our brain.
The “fight / flight / freeze” response:
Imagine if you are walking across a road and a car is coming at you quickly, if you use the thinking part of your brain to think about what colour the car is, who is driving, what make the car is, different routes you could take to get out the road, etc.; you risk being hit by the car. So you don’t want to use your thinking system, you need to use your “emergency” system (the lower brain).
The lower brain doesn’t think, it does. It sends a “threat” signal to your body and your body will take over, you will get a rush of adrenaline to prepare you to either fight, flight or freeze; “fighting” the car is not useful, “freezing” will have you stopping in the road, so instead you will “flight”, you will run out of the road. Here the brain has done its job, it’s kept you safe.
During the “fight / flight” response, your brain releases adrenaline into your body, this makes our heart beat faster to help pump blood quickly round our body, this is because if we are to run or fight, we need our legs and arms to have blood available for our muscles. Our lungs need to breathe faster so as we get more oxygen going in to the body. We take blood away from non-essential organs at that time, so if we are in immediate danger we divert blood away from our gut and digestive system. This is a really effective system if we are about to burn this adrenaline off (by running / fighting) but if we are just sitting then this leaves us feeling really uncomfortable.
Once the danger is over (the car has gone past) and you are safe your brain will start to reset. Imagine, you have just managed to avoid being hit by a car. You will feel a sense of relief and the adrenaline you felt in your body will start to leave. However, as you walk home you may be more hypervigiliant; paying attention a bit closer to other cars and speed. It’s a way of our brains focusing more on potential threats to keep us alive. Over time this hyper-vigilance leaves us and our brains have reset to a normal level.
It is an evolutionary adaption to focus on risk. We are designed to remember negative memories more than we are positive events. It is survival – we are more likely to survive if we see things as more negative or risky. However, it feels incredibly uncomfortable to live with so much anxiety, so we need our thinking brain to rationalise and think about whether we need to be so worried or afraid.
What can we do to manage anxiety?
· Maintaining a regular sleep / wake routine, and meal times is important for your body’s circadian rhythm. When it is disrupted we feel out of sorts and find it hard to focus.
· Exercise: it helps disperse adrenaline in our body, this means we can burn off some of those physically difficult feelings.
· Notice and name the anxiety and difficult feelings: If we name an emotion we move from the lower part of our brain and increase activity in the upper brain (the “human” thinking brain). This means we can think more about the problem.
· Make time to think about what is causing the anxious feelings: You may want to write a journal, draw the feelings, or talk this through with someone else.
· Be a scientist to your thoughts: Sometimes when we worry we tend to imagine the worst thing happening and yet we can’t predict the future. It may be helpful to think about what others would say about your worries. Are there any different perspectives you can find? How likely is it that that worry will come true?
· Make a worry time: You could set a time aside each day that you go through your worries and think about them either with someone else or by yourself. This may free you up for the rest of the day to not have to manage them.
· Breathe: Breathing helps you to overcome the physical feelings of anxiety, and return to a state of calm. A useful check can be to put one hand on your stomach and one on the top of your lungs/chest. Ensure that your breath goes right down into your belly and doesn’t stay in a shallow breath at the top of your lungs.