Stress, anxiety, and fear are overwhelming for many adolescents. Even for those who are not debilitated by it, it can be a constant challenge to overcome the messages they receive to be better, stronger, and smarter. Unfortunately, fear and stress impair our ability to learn and our willingness to be curious and explore the world, and during this time of dramatic brain development, it is important to keep our children learning.
Stress and anxiety are often responses to our culture’s thirst for academic achievement; teen suicide rates are higher than ever, there is more competition to get into “good” colleges, and kids spend more time doing extracurricular activities than ever before.
While these lessons and activities are by no means a substitute for counseling, they can help teens and tweens gain a little more insight into how stress and anxiety affect their lives and how to handle it a little better. Adolescents who are suffering from anxiety often report feeling isolated and ashamed, and discovering how many of their peers struggle with similar feelings can be a great comfort.
Many individuals who struggle with stress, anxiety, and fear believe that these things are simply characteristics they will have forever; however, we can learn new ways to think about and cope with these uncomfortable emotions and realize that we are not defined by them. Developing an understanding of how stress, anxiety, and fear show up in our lives is the first step toward learning how to manage these emotions instead of being held hostage by them. By acknowledging that these are common feelings, students can move through them rather than fighting or denying them and begin to anticipate when they might show up. Over time, they will build resilience. In this section, they will learn how each emotion works and how to handle them.
“STRESS = Someone Trying to Repair Every Situation Solo.”—Dave Willis
Objective: Students will learn about the positive effects of sharing their feelings and frustrations and discover that doing so can strengthen relationships rather than put them in jeopardy.
Tools:
• Discussion Prompt (5 minutes of introduction, 20+ minutes of discussion)
• Short-Circuit the Anxiety Reaction activity (10 minutes)
• Digging Out meditation (5 minutes)
Discussion: Human beings are social creatures. We live in communities for a reason, namely, that nobody is equipped to tackle every challenge alone. Ever since humans have existed, we have collaborated in order to make our lives better. Studies show that people with more social connections have fewer depressive symptoms as well. What if the beauty of challenges is that they offer us opportunities to work with and more deeply connect with others?
Discussion Questions:
• Ask students to think about their closest, most cherished relationships. Were any of them forged after one person needed help and the other one gave it? The people we trust most in life are often the ones who saved our bacon a time or two or those whose bacon we saved.
• Talk with students about how they react when friends or family members are struggling. Do they have compassion and empathy, or do they blame them and talk down to them? How is that different than the way they talk to themselves when they find themselves in a jam? If it is different, why?
• Why are many of us so determined to take care of our problems alone and keep them quiet? What would it take for us to see our mistakes as learning opportunities or potential ways to connect more authentically with others?
Activity: Short-Circuit the Anxiety Reaction (see Appendix A)
Meditation: Digging Out
Sometimes things happen that we have no control over, and they cause us trauma. It is important to know that our brains treat all trauma the same way; whether it’s abuse, a car accident, the death of someone close to you—your brain just imprints it as trauma. Some people have more effective ways of dealing with the aftereffects of trauma, but it is never OK to compare your trauma with anyone else’s, either to belittle theirs or to try and talk yourself out of feeling sad and scared (“Seriously, why is my parents’ divorce bugging me so much? It isn’t like someone died!”). You don’t have to make excuses for how you feel.
Find a comfortable sitting position, and close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths to settle in and clear any stray thoughts. Picture yourself waking up in a small house. It’s cozy and warm and the middle of winter. As you walk to the kitchen, you look outside and notice there was a blizzard overnight, and you are stuck inside the house. All you can see outside is white—piles and piles of snow. When you listen to the radio, you realize this isn’t going to thaw anytime soon, and if you want to get anywhere, it’s up to you to do something about it.
This is your trauma. You can absolutely stay inside and hope for rescue, or you can pick up a shovel and start digging a path.
The important thing to know about this snowstorm/trauma is that it isn’t your fault. You didn’t do anything to create it or ask for it, but you’re stuck with it for now. If you want to get out, you’re going to have to start working. It may take days and lots of effort on your part, but you can make progress every time you work on it. Even better, you can imagine someone into being who will help you. Think about someone you trust, who loves you, and who won’t yell at you about the mess.
Dress warmly and comfortably, and when you’re ready, you and your helper can both pick up a snow shovel and open the door.
There is just enough room to scoop up some snow and put it to the side. Each time you dig in, you are acknowledging some of the pain you feel. Work as quickly or as slowly as you wish. You are welcome to take breaks and come inside where it’s warm to relax. You’ve got a companion or companions who make the work lighter. Working on it nonstop will wear you out, and you’ll only have to spend more time recovering. With every scoop, know that you are making the piles smaller.
Take a break and come inside. Do something that feels restful and nourishing. Acknowledge what it feels like to know that someone is there to help you when you’re ready to begin again, and then take a minute to feel good about the work you’ve done, including asking for help. When you’re feeling settled and rested, take a deep breath, and open your eyes.
“Don’t believe every worried thought you have. Worried thoughts are notoriously inaccurate.”—Renee Jain
Objective: Students will learn that it is the way they view the world that has the most impact on their mood and emotions. They will explore ideas about fear and changing perspective and talk about the choices they make every day that affect their outlook.
Tools:
• Discussion Prompt (5–10 minutes of introduction, 20+ minutes of discussion)
• Cracking Up Your Inner Critic activity (10 minutes)
• Being in Your Body meditation (5 minutes)
Discussion: Fear is a great survival tool but only when used with some perspective. When we are afraid, we are looking to the future to see what might go wrong. Unfortunately, all too often we convince ourselves that these predictions are the likely outcome when they generally aren’t. It turns out that our worst fears rarely come true, but our brains are hardwired to expect the worst so that we can try to plan for it. It’s important, during the adolescent years, to try and mitigate some of that anxiety by enacting a little rewiring and putting emphasis on learning from past experiences.
Wisdom looks to the future, but it also takes into account what has happened in the past, and when it looks forward, it sees possibility instead of tragedy. When we don’t get caught up in the emotions of fear, we can begin using wisdom instead. When we can remind ourselves that happy endings do occur, we can talk ourselves down from some of that fear and anxiety.
Equanimity is a word that means simply accepting where you find yourself right now without building a story around it. It doesn’t say, “Man, why am I here again?” and it also doesn’t say, “Oh, dang! This is gonna be bad.” It simply says, “I forgot to turn in my math assignment. Crud.”
In Learning from the Heart, Daniel Gottlieb writes about his dad in a perfect illustration of how our mindset can color our expectations. His father got older and progressively lost his hair, as well as “his hearing, his stamina and his sense of taste. Losing those things didn’t seem to bother him much, but some other things did. When he was in his eighties, my father used to say, ‘I’m ready to leave this vale of tears.’ One day I asked him if he was really in so much emotional pain that he was ready to die. ‘Some days, I am,’ he said. ‘So tell me about those days, Dad.’ ‘Well, I get thinking. I buried my wife and my daughter. And I think of my only son struggling every day in a wheelchair. Those days I’m ready to die.’ ‘But Dad,’ I said, ‘those things are true every day. What about those days you aren’t ready to die?’ He thought about it for a minute. ‘I guess I’m not thinking about those things on those days.’”1
Discussion Questions:
• Ask your students to think about a time when they worried about the worst-case scenario and it didn’t happen. What did it feel like to be consumed by fear? How did it feel later when their worst fear didn’t come to pass?
• Ask students whether they have days when they struggle with the circumstances of their lives more than others. Can they identify any patterns? For instance, could it be on the days when their glass is “half full” that they are busy doing things they enjoy?
• Have your students identify a short list of things in their lives that they can’t control that they sometimes get upset about. Ask them to talk about strategies for accepting those things and creating more days where they can let go and have more equanimity.
Activity: Cracking Up Your Inner Critic (see Appendix A)
Meditation: Being in Your Body
Some students who have suffered physical trauma may choose to opt out of this meditation because it can bring up reserves of emotion that are uncomfortable. If at any time a student expresses their discomfort with being in their body, the feeling should be honored.
Find a comfortable sitting position, and breathe deeply in and out. Notice whether your belly moves or not. If most of your breath is in your chest, try to see if you can get your belly to move more than your chest. This often results in deeper breaths.
Continue breathing deeply and slowly, and focus on your left foot. Notice what it feels like, and see if you can picture it in your mind’s eye. Slowly move your attention up your left leg to your hip as you breathe in, and as you exhale, slide your attention back down to your foot. Notice whether you feel anything in that leg. Are there any areas of tightness or discomfort? Any sensations you notice? Keep breathing.
Now focus your awareness on your right foot. Pay close attention for a moment before you slide your breath up and down your right leg. At first, you’re just breathing in and out, and after the first round, you can note whether you feel anything significant. Don’t name anything or label it bad or good; just notice it and move on.
Now focus on your stomach. Feel it rise as you breathe in and sink as you exhale. Notice any sensation in your belly as you breathe in and out slowly a few times.
Move your attention to your left hand, and really feel how it is. What is it resting on? Is it flat or curled a little? Breathe in, and move your focus up your arm and through your elbow to the shoulder. Breathe out, and scan your attention back down. Breathe for two more rounds up and down, noticing any sensations present.
Repeat this with your right hand. Breathe in and out, and stay with your hand. Breathe in as you move up your arm and out as you move down. Do two more rounds with focused attention on anywhere that feels different.
Breathe deeply and notice your lungs filling and emptying. Focus your attention up through your neck to your face. Slowly breathe into your jaw, and relax your throat. See if you can relax your facial muscles completely. Breathe as you pay attention to your ears, the back of your head, and the top of your head. Breathe for a few rounds, and note whether you feel any tension or discomfort anywhere.
Lastly, you’ll breathe deeply, moving your attention from the soles of your feet up through your body and out the top of your head. Relax, and open your eyes.
“Don’t ruin a good today by thinking about a bad yesterday.”—Unknown
Objective: Students will learn about the progression of thoughts to feelings that result in anxiety and stress. They will explore ways to build awareness and begin practicing ways to see everyday situations indifferently.
Tools:
• Discussion Prompt (5–10 minutes of introduction, 20+ minutes of discussion)
• Dealing with Social Anxiety activity (10 minutes)
• Growth and Change meditation (5 minutes)
Discussion: By the time we are in our teen years, we are pretty good at freaking ourselves out, whether we know it or not. One way we do so is by saying to ourselves, “I should(n’t) have ________” or “I can’t _______” as we think about what someone else would have expected us to do. We do this so automatically that we are generally pretty far down the road of anxiety before we realize it, if we realize it at all.
We believe our thoughts and assumptions, and when we start to act on them, we can build habits that last for a long time. Maybe you are invited out to lunch with a group of friends and you want to go, but you don’t have any money to spend. A typical thought process can go something like this:
1. If I ask someone to loan me money, they’ll think I’m poor and not invite me to come again.
2. If they think I’m poor, they will either pity me and treat me differently or avoid me because it’s so awkward.
3. If I act like I’m not hungry, I don’t have to worry about any of that.
The third solution seems perfectly reasonable until the next time you’re invited to join these same friends again. If your strategy worked the first time, you’d likely tell everyone that you’re not hungry again. What ends up happening is that you set a pattern of behavior and interaction with friends based on your assumptions and fear, and you end up being hungry and watching them all as they eat.
We spend a lot of time and energy imagining that we know what other people are thinking about us without actually checking any of it out. These imaginings are almost always driven by fear and make us feel awful about ourselves. Missing that layup in PE can make us feel as if everyone in the room is laughing at us, but that is rarely the case, and even if they do, they’ve likely moved on during the next minute or two, but that feeling of embarrassment stays with us for hours or days afterward. The amount of time that others are thinking about us is generally much smaller than the amount of time we believe they are.
Discussion Questions:
• Have students think of a time when they made a decision based on the assumption that others would judge them. Can they look at the thought process and determine how their behavior was affected by this assumption?
• Ask students to talk about a time when they made a mistake that other people witnessed. Talk about what that felt like and how long the emotion persisted. Now ask students how often they really think about the everyday actions of other people during the course of a day.
• How often are students harsher critics of themselves than they are of others? Can they try to be as patient with themselves as they are with their best friend or a younger sibling?
• Discuss whether there are similarities in the kinds of things that send students into an anxiety spiral of negative or fearful self-talk. Are they all worried about the same things, for the most part?
Activity: Dealing with Social Anxiety (see Appendix A)
Meditation: Growth and Change
We tend to believe that we can grow and change in certain ways but not in others. For example, you might think that you can get better at baseball or soccer but that you’ll always struggle with math or science. The truth is, we are always changing and growing, and as Dr. Shauna Shapiro says, “What you practice grows.”2 This meditation is great for reminding us that we can choose how we see our own growth and that we can always continue to push ourselves to be better at anything.
Sit in a comfortable position, and close your eyes. Breathe deeply in and out a few times to settle in and clear your mind. Picture yourself as a strong, beautiful serpent. Take a minute to look at yourself, and note the colors of your scales and the long, strong body. As you breathe deeply, I want you to notice that your current skin is feeling a little too tight, a little restrictive.
Breathe slowly and imagine moving forward, slowly beginning to slither out of that skin and leaving it behind. As you move, sense the restriction easing a bit. Keep progressing a little at a time and feel the space you have to expand, to become something more, to fully inhabit your new skin.
Once you’ve fully made your way out of the old shell, look back and acknowledge how much you’ve grown. That old skin protected you and shielded you and gave you some of your color for a while, but it’s time for you to move on now. You are moving about in the world in a bigger way, with more impact and responsibility. It is normal to feel a little vulnerable before your new skin hardens fully, but you can focus on the freedom and power you have just given yourself. You can choose to shed your old skin anytime it becomes too small. You can move toward the goals you set for yourself, even if it feels frightening, because you deserve to have room to breathe.
When you’re ready, take an especially deep breath in, and open your eyes.
“Some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”—Albert Camus
Objective: Students will become aware of how often we all rely on individual stereotypes to define ourselves and begin to find ways to break out of those boundaries to really express their complex personalities.
Tools:
• Discussion Prompt (5–10 minutes of introduction, 20+ minutes of discussion)
• Calming Physical Reactions to Anxiety activity (10 minutes)
• Walking the Path meditation (5 minutes)
Discussion: Human beings love stories. We find them both entertaining and useful for organizing information. Unfortunately, when the same stories are told over and over again, they often become exaggerated and lose some of their “truth,” but we still believe them and live our lives as if they are real. Are you the “fearless one”? The “control freak”? The “ditz”? There may be several examples of how you exhibit some of those characteristics, but as we grow and age, we often cling to those old stories instead of recognizing all of the other things that we do or say or care about that might not fit that story anymore.
It is important to note that we all do this, and it is rarely done with bad intent. It is normal for us to find shorthand ways to describe our friends and family, and often, we find it humorous as well. The trouble comes when we start to believe that those things tell the whole story of who we are.
However, what about the stories we wish people told about us? Do you hope people see you as generous and openhearted or ambitious and driven? When we feel like the more negative stories are taking over, it can help to mentally list a couple of examples of things that defy those stories to shift our perspective and ensure that we don’t get trapped into habits of conforming to others’ ideas of us.
Discussion Questions:
• Have students share some of the stories told about them in their family or friend groups. Is it harmful or helpful to let those labels define them? Is it limiting at all?
• Has anyone ever used those stories or labels to justify their action or inaction in a particular scenario?
• What is one story you wish was told about you that isn’t?
Activity: Calming Physical Reactions to Anxiety (see Appendix A)
Meditation: Walking the Path
Find a comfortable position, and close your eyes softly. Take a deep breath to clear any stray thoughts from your mind.
Imagine that you are entering a brightly lit building, and once inside, you see several paths stretching out in front of you. There is no rush to choose one, so you can stand and observe as long as you want to. Signs are pointing to different areas where you can dance and sing, where you can choose to spend time quietly reading, where you can join loved ones, or pursue activities that are important to you, such as sports or gaming or art.
As you begin to move down one path, signs from the paths you didn’t choose flash in front of you from time to time and side routes open up as possibilities. You can decide whether to shift your path or not at any time. If you feel you’ve chosen a path that isn’t really fitting anymore, create a new one in your imagination to step onto. Name it. Notice what it feels like, what you think about as you step onto it. Take a minute to think about how you decide which path is the “correct” one for right now.
Stop for a minute and see if you can decide what one of your most deeply held values is. Is it family or hard work? Creativity or social justice? Rest or laughter? When you have one key value in your head, imagine a path opening up before you that nurtures that value and lets you move forward.
See all of the other signs fall away as you take a few steps forward, and think about what it feels like to be on this path that represents your true self and something that is incredibly important to you. Sit with that feeling for a minute before taking another deep breath and opening your eyes.
“The fears we don’t face become our limits.”—Robin Sharma
Objective: Students will learn to identify when they are beginning to get anxious and work on ways to keep their anxiety from taking over.
Tools:
• Discussion Prompt (5–10 minutes of introduction, 20+ minutes of discussion)
• Relaxation Strategies activity (10 minutes)
• Change as a Constant meditation (5 minutes)
Discussion: Our nervous systems are wired to perk up when we encounter someone or something unusual. This can be anything from an unexpected sound or shadow to a situation where we don’t see anyone who looks like us to a disapproving look on the face of a parent or teacher.
When this happens, we feel many things—our heart rate quickens, we can break out in a sweat, and our hands might get cold. We start breathing faster, and our muscles tense up. All of these things are biologically designed to help us either run away or fight. In our modern world, however, we rarely have to resort to one of those actions, and yet we still feel discomfort at the physical sensation of anxiety. Our minds try to manage that discomfort by leaving, convincing ourselves that it isn’t so scary, or making ourselves look bigger to feel more powerful.
Unfortunately, the effect of this fear on our brain generally means that we get defensive and assume the worst. We quickly begin weaving a story that tries to make sense of the situation, and we often end up overreacting or creating a great deal of stress for ourselves. We also tend to be a lot less empathetic and don’t consider the context of the situation. Instead of seeing someone who is hurting, we see someone who is angry.
Discussion Questions:
• Have students talk about a time when they were caught off guard and they felt anxious. What was the outcome of that situation? Did it cause a great deal of stress for a prolonged period of time or cause an argument?
• Has anyone experienced anxiety that lasts long after the inciting incident is over? Has anyone ever found themselves lying awake, reliving a discussion or scenario that went sideways, and worrying about the long-term effects of it?
• What kind of self-talk do students engage in when they are anxious? What about after the stimulus is gone?
Activity: Relaxation Strategies (see Appendix A)
Meditation: Change as a Constant
Sit in a comfortable position, and close your eyes. Breathe deeply in and out a few times to settle in and clear your mind.
Picture yourself lying on your back in the ocean. You are close enough to the shore to see it, and if you stand up, your feet will touch the sandy ocean floor. The water is warm and fairly calm, but as you lie there, you can feel yourself rising up and down with the movement of the waves.
Life is a lot like the ocean; there are ups and downs, and it can be rough at the edges. When you are on the shore, you can see the waves coming toward you and anticipate when they’ll break, even if sometimes they are bigger than you expected. This perspective gives us a false sense of control and lets us believe that we can predict what will happen. However, when you’re lying on your back, rising up and down with the gentle movement of the waves, it is harder to know where we are.
Lie there and just let your body relax with the movement of the ocean for a few moments. Know that nothing frightening will happen—you can’t sink or get overtaken by a crashing wave. You are simply letting the water lift you over and over again.
When we go to the ocean, we expect there to be constant change and movement. The messages we write on the sand will be washed away, the tide will encroach and then recede. However, while these little things change, the big picture remains mostly the same. Let that be a metaphor for your life.
We often get anxious about change, about approaching new things, and we try to control them by learning enough to think that we can predict them or by denying them and pretending they aren’t there. What if we saw our lives as we do the ocean? What if we acknowledged that there will be ups and downs, things will be written and erased, and through it all, we can ride the motion knowing that the big things—our values and who we are at our core—won’t change unless we choose that? What would that feel like?
Rest and breathe deeply with your eyes closed for another minute as you feel the ocean moving in synch with your life. When you’re ready, take a deep breath, and open your eyes.
NOTES
1. Gottlieb, Daniel. 2008. Learning from the Heart: Lessons on Living, Loving, and Listening. New York: Sterling Publishing Co.
2. Shapiro, Shauna. March 10, 2017. “The Power of Mindfulness: What you Practice Grows Stronger.” Video retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeblJdB2-Vo.