Click here to listen to this week’s JAM: Anxiety’s PR Problem
I have to admit, I’ve been a bit anxious lately. The opening of the Upper School – one of the most energizing and challenging projects with which I have ever been involved – has me feeling all types of emotions, including some anxiety.
Now, before you become overly concerned, I share this in part because of a recent presentation I saw that helped me reframe my understanding of anxiety. A few weeks ago at the National Association of Independent School’s Conference, Dr. Tracy Dennis-Tiwary, author of Future Tense: Why Anxiety is Good For You, talked about what she labeled the anxiety paradox, or as she put it – “why we have to help kids feel bad so they can learn to feel good.”
She argued that anxiety has a PR problem. It’s an emotion that we all have, and yet we are continually telling people, particularly children, all the wrong things about it. In particular, people typically frame anxiety as either a product of trauma – something bad has happened and so you experience anxiety – or a character flaw that results from personal weakness or lack of willpower. Either mindset leads to the same solution – avoidance. Unfortunately, avoidance is the exact opposite of what you want to do to manage anxiety.
Emotions are advantageous, she reminds us, as they give us information and allow us to prepare. Anxiety’s role as an emotion is to let you know that your future outcome is uncertain. Listening to this emotion enables you to do something about it. She points out that you are only anxious when you care. Most importantly, she points out that anxiety is a feature of being human, not a bug. We don’t need to work around it, we need to work through it.
She pointed us to a short article in the Washington Post which I have included in the notes section – “Don’t Worry Less, Worry Smarter” – which provides guidance for how to help all of us, including children, better manage the worry that leads to anxiety. My favorite suggestion was the creation of a worry time. During this time, she suggests, “Write down all the worries that pop into your head and describe them clearly and concretely. Consider the negative outcomes, as well as the positive possibilities. Only worry during worry time. It might surprise you to find that during worry time, you become bored of worrying and stop early.”
As parents, the most important thing we can remember, she says, is to “listen, leverage, and let go.” When we listen, she reminds us, we need to remember to validate our children’s feelings and avoid the desire to immediately fix or soothe them. Ask questions – what are you feeling? What is this telling you that you care about? Then, she says, help them leverage that feeling into making a plan of action. What are you worried about and what steps can you take to move forward? Make these steps as concrete as possible, and make sure they are small and doable. Too big and too vague typically leads us nowhere. Finally, she encourages us to help children let go.
I should add that Dr. Dennis-Tiwary also made a point to highlight that anxiety disorders are real, and that for some people anxiety can be crippling. Even in those situations she notes, however, that the way forward for people is to work through your anxiety, not around it. Avoidance is never the solution.
Earlier this spring, I talked to students about how we are capable of doing hard things. Part of that is the ability to persevere and not let feelings like anxiety stop us from moving forward. Emotions are advantageous, as she pointed out, and as a school one of the most important things we can do is help students understand that and work to understand their emotions and use that information to help them thrive.
Sometimes some students have judged themselves and the result is that it makes the level of anxiety even higher. It is important to be able to manage emotions and thoughts