1. Defining the Worry Words

I don’t think it’s ever been harder to be a teenager than it is today. Especially a teenage girl. Again, I’ve been counseling girls for almost thirty years. That’s a lot of years. And a lot of girls.

I’ll share reasons why I believe the teen years are hard, but first, I’d love to know what you think. Do you agree? Why do you think it’s especially hard to be a teenage girl today?

  

  

That’s a great list, I’m sure. Here’s something I want you to know as we go through this book together. What you’re saying makes sense. I know, I know—I can’t hear you. But I still know it’s true. The most important thing is not even what you say, but that you’re saying it. For that reason, there is going to be a lot of space in this book for you to journal—and draw too, if you’re more of a draw-er than a journaler. I’d love for you to do a little of both.

Worry’s Best Tricks

Anxiety has a lot of tricks it tries to play on you. We’ll talk about specific tricks and tools in the “Help” section, but I’m going to go ahead and tell you two of worry’s biggest tricks.

Worry tries to make you think

  1. something is wrong with you.
  2. you’re the only one who feels this way.

Anxiety—we’ll give him a better name later—is a big fat liar. Both statements above are untrue. Sadly, though, almost every girl I’ve met has believed those two things. It’s why I want to disprove them both right here in the beginning. They’re his best tricks, and he’s the worst for trying to tell you those things.

Nothing is wrong with you. We’re going to talk in chapter 2 about why you specifically might struggle with worry and anxiety, but I’ll go ahead and tell you that rather than something being wrong with your brain, it means something is really right. And you’re in good company. Actually, almost one in three kids struggle with anxiety,1 and girls are twice as likely as boys.2

That means there’s a good chance it’s also happening to the girl who sits beside you in class, or the one whose locker is next to yours, or even the girl in your grade who intimidates you the most. It might be happening to your best friend too, and you don’t know because neither of you has said it out loud. That’s what happens with worry and anxiety. We have these thoughts . . . these scary thoughts that feel like they consume us at times. We feel like we’re the only ones, so we don’t say anything to anyone. The thoughts make us feel like something is wrong with us. Again, I can promise you that it’s not. And we’ve already started to disprove the second idea; you can tell from the statistics that you’re not alone. I sit with girls every day who have those kinds of thoughts looping around in their very normal, very smart brains. More on that later too.

You’re not alone. C. S. Lewis wrote, “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You, too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”3 Anxiety tries to make you feel like you are the only one who’s ever worried this much or who has ever worried about something that sounds this silly. (It’s really not silly, no matter what it is. It might sound silly to you when the worry passes, but it sure feels real when you’re in the worry.)

Anxiety is an isolator. Because it makes us feel like something is wrong with us, we don’t end up talking about it.

We’ve established that anxiety is a liar and an isolator. It’s also very confusing, which is one reason it’s particularly hard to be a teenage girl today.

I remember sitting with a group of girls your age not too long ago. We were talking about how common it is for teenage girls to use the word anxiety when describing themselves or how they felt about a certain situation. “I have anxiety,” or “I had an anxiety attack last night,” or “Such-and-such gives me anxiety.” You know. You’ve heard these statements too. I will never forget the words one girl said: “We probably use the word so much because no one would listen if you just said you were stressed.” All of the other girls agreed. Have you ever felt that way?

▢ For sure         ▢ No, not really

When I was growing up, if we wanted to really upset our parents, we might say, “I’m going to run away!” Now girls as young as eight are threatening to take their own lives when they’re mad at their parents. I would imagine that you hear people talk about how “depressed they are,” mention that they had a “panic attack” the night before, or throw around words like suicidal and bipolar and PTSD at the lunch table almost daily. Now, don’t get me wrong—some of those girls might really be experiencing those struggles. But here’s the problem: Some aren’t. You know that already. Some just want big words to describe their big feelings. Others want someone to listen and feel like no one is, including their parents or their peers, so they think the bigger their words, the more likely someone will be to listen.

Here’s another problem: When girls use those words when they’re not really experiencing those things, the words lose their meaning. Then, when you’re struggling, it’s hard to know what the word really does mean or whether anyone will listen to you, because it feels like everyone your age today has anxiety.

That’s where we’re going to start, with the definitions of the words you hear thrown around a lot among girls your age. You might have even noticed that I’ve been using the words worry and anxiety interchangeably. Fear, worry, anxiety, stress, pressure, and even anxiety disorders are all important to understand in today’s world. I truly believe that the more we know about worry and anxiety, the easier they are to beat. So let’s start with a few definitions of these worry words, from a counselor’s perspective.

The Worry Continuum

In the book for your parents, I talked about what I call “the worry continuum.” It looks a little like this:

fig026

Fear

It all starts with fear. Fears are those things we’re afraid of . . . that maybe make us jump or even scream sometimes. You might be afraid of spiders, snakes, or jellyfish in the ocean. Those are three of my biggies. An important word with fear is that we’re afraid of something. Fears are objects that our amygdala has developed an unpleasant emotional attachment to. We’ll talk more about the amygdala later. But fear is usually attached to something, or even the threat of that thing. When the thing or the threat comes, our emotions take over. (According to my babysitter, Lauren, I’d only let her pick me up if there was a bug near me—or I thought there was. I’d scream, cry, and run to her.) When we are in the presence of the object we fear, we have a great deal of emotion, but once it’s gone, so is the emotion. We move on.

What are your top three fears?

  

  

Worry

Fear changes to worry when it hangs around a little more. Worry is more pervasive, meaning it doesn’t go away just because we get away from the bug. We’re not worried of something, we’re worried about it. It revolves around more of a general subject than a specific object. We worry that someone we love might get cancer. We worry we won’t make good enough grades or won’t be able to beat our personal record in a track meet. We worry our friends are mad at us, or that we come off as awkward sometimes with other people.

What are three things you worry about?

  

  

Anxiety

Then there’s anxiety. The word anxiety really has replaced the word worry for most girls your age I know, but anxiety is different from fear or worry. Anxiety can be about any of the things we feel afraid of or worried about—but instead of the fear or worry passing through our minds, it gets stuck. I tell girls all the time in my counseling office that it’s like the one-loop roller coaster at the fair. You know it, if you’ve seen one. It’s a roller coaster, but it doesn’t go anywhere but the same loop, over and over and over. When you have anxiety, your scary thought circles around and around, and you just can’t seem to make it stop.

If you had to say right now the thing that loops around the most in your brain—that you worry about and can’t seem to make stop—what would it be? It can be something that makes a lot of sense, or even feels silly. I’ve talked to girls who have looping thoughts about everything you can imagine. What’s yours?

  

  

You might even have a couple of things that loop in your brain. It could be that you had one thing a few years ago, but now you have a new thing that’s replaced it. Maybe, when you were younger, you worried that something terrible would happen to your mom or dad. You could hardly stand to have a babysitter or for them to go out of town, you’d get so worried. Now maybe you worry about getting a bad grade or doing something wrong. Maybe you even feel like you have to tell your parents every single thing you ever do wrong, or even things you think you might do wrong. Maybe you got sick and threw up a few months ago, and now every time your tummy feels a bit off, you worry you’re going to throw up again. Maybe you worry your friends don’t want to be your friends any longer. That they think you’re annoying and they’re only being nice because they don’t want to seem rude.

Naming the Worry

Here’s the thing about anxiety. It’s a little like the Whac-A-Mole game at Chuck E. Cheese. You remember—you are standing over a board, holding a hammer. A little mole pops up. And just when you bang the hammer down, he pops up somewhere else. And again. And again. The mole knows how to get under your skin. Anxiety is the same. It’s not only a liar and an isolator, but it’s smart. In fact, I think it’s time to interrupt this information on anxiety to go ahead and give him a name. It could be a him or her. It could even be an it. But my guess is that you already know his voice. He’s the one who tells you things like these:

“You can’t.”

“It’s too hard.”

“You’ll never do enough.”

“The worst thing you can imagine happening is the thing that most likely will happen.”

“You’ll fail.”

“They’ll laugh.”

“Your mom is going to get cancer.”

“If you don’t check and recheck the door, someone might come in and hurt your family.”

“Someone already has come in and hurt your family, and they’re on the way up the stairs to you.”

That last sentence is something that used to loop in my brain when I was in high school. I’d lie awake in bed at night, terrified. I would imagine that someone had already killed my parents and was coming up the stairs to get me. I had this strange game I played with myself where I’d watch the clock and think, If I just make it to 3:20, I’ll be okay. And Now I have to make it to 3:30. Then I’ll be okay. And so on. Not only was the worry telling me the worst-case scenario had come true, but it was also telling me something I had to do to make myself feel better. I’d lie there in my bed, watching the clock, listening and obeying everything that worry told me. Only I didn’t have anyone telling me that the voice wasn’t true, that it was worry lying. And I certainly didn’t know anyone else had ever felt the same way. I wish I had. I wish I had known that I could beat him. I think it would have helped me learn how to fight anxiety much younger than I did. Now I know how to recognize his voice and know not to give him any power. He doesn’t deserve it. Not in my world or in yours.

What are some things worry says to you?

  

  

Let’s come up with a name for that lying, isolating, smart, truly annoying voice that whispers those kinds of lies to you. We want to give him a name because I want you to remember that his voice is not yours. It’s not yours, and it’s not true. Many of the younger girls I work with call him the Worry Monster. One calls him Bob. I know some high school girls who call him things like the Great Exaggerator or He Who Must Not Be Named or just plain Worry, and I know one girl who named hers Agnes. The point is, we want to separate his (or her) voice from yours. Plus, it’s easier to talk about him when he has a name.

As a side note, when we talk about someone who isolates and lies and is smart, it sure reminds me of someone else that you may be thinking of too. I did a podcast not too long ago with my friend Annie F. Downs. I don’t know if you’ve read her books, but I highly recommend them. When we were talking about the Worry Monster, she looked at me and said, “Is it demonic?” I laughed and thought she was kidding, mostly because that’s not a word I use to describe things very much. She wasn’t kidding—and yes, it is, although calling it demonic might not be the way you normally talk about things either. Basically, she was saying, “Is that Satan’s voice disguised as the Worry Monster?” It sure is. Satan, in Scripture, is called the Father of Lies. John 8:44 says, “He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” I absolutely believe that his voice and the worry voice you hear in your head are one and the same. Call him the Enemy if you’d rather—but only if thinking of him that way won’t cause you more anxiety. I don’t want you to have a looping thought that Satan is in your head. He’s not. He just tries to lie and trick you into worrying, just like he tries to trick you into other destructive things. The great news is that Jesus has already beaten him and given you the power to beat him too—whatever name you call him.

Because of how smart and sneaky he is, I’m going to call him the Worry Whisperer for now. Regardless of what we call him, we need to understand his ways. The more we learn about him, the easier it is to fight him.

Here’s what we’ve learned about the Worry Whisperer so far:

The Whac-a-Mole Ways of Worry

The Worry Whisperer knows the things that you are most likely to worry about at any given age. He knows the thing that would be the scariest in second grade—like something bad happening to your parents. And sixth grade—like throwing up. And tenth grade—like failing a certain subject or being abandoned by friends. He then takes those intrusive thoughts (intrusive because they intrude on whatever you’re thinking about right then) and drops them into your brain. Because those thoughts represent the scariest thing you can imagine at that particular age, they are the thoughts that have the most power. Therefore, they’re the thoughts that get stuck. Whac-a-mole. You beat him in one area in second grade. He pops up in a different way in sixth. And so on. The great news is the tools that beat him in second grade work in sixth and tenth as well. They continue to work when you’re a grown-up too. Anxiety expert Tamar Chansky says that although “anxiety is the number one mental health problem facing children and adolescents today . . . it is also the most treatable.”4 We’re gonna prove together just how weak this Worry Whisperer is!

I do want to mention two more words that aren’t used much in your world anymore, though they certainly should be. Stress and pressure. We’re going to talk about them both in the next chapter. Stress is a powerful force and one that kicks the Worry Whisperer into high gear. I believe you live with profoundly more stress than I did when I was growing up, and more than your mom and grandmother grew up with. You live with more pressure to get things right, to succeed, to look beautiful, and to have all of your friends and followers on social media respond. It’s a lot.

I’m going to use the words worry and anxiety in this book interchangeably, mostly because some of you live more in the land of worry, some of you struggle more with anxiety, and some of you flip back and forth. In fact, we all worry at least a little—people who don’t worry at all certainly aren’t reading this book.

When to Worry about Your Level of Worry

Actually, I don’t ever want you to worry about your worry. Maybe we should call this section “When to Make Sure You Have Someone in Your Life to Help You with Your Level of Worry.” In this book, we’re going to be talking about worry and anxiety both. I do want you to know that we can feel anxious and even struggle with anxiety without it being “diagnosable.” Diagnosable anxiety is what the folks in my profession would refer to as a disorder. It could also be called clinical anxiety at that point. Clinical anxiety comes in many shapes and sizes. There’s social anxiety, phobias (debilitating fears around certain objects), panic disorder, and panic attacks. Obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are very similar to anxiety disorders. And then there’s the wider diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder, as well as several others. Just because you identify with the anxiety we talk about in this book does not necessarily mean that you have one of these or any kind of anxiety disorder. Don’t jump to diagnosing yourself. Your feelings are valid even without a diagnosis. You don’t want to be defined by a struggle you’re experiencing.

If any of the following apply to you, I want you to talk to someone. Show your parents this section of the book and let them know I said it was time.

Anxiety left untreated only gets worse. It can also lead to depression when it goes on for too long. But we’re not going to let it.

Here’s the good news: You can do this. You’re not alone. You’ve got me, and you’ve got people in your life who love you and want to help. You’ve got a God who delights in you and has beaten every Worry Whisperer that’s ever been or ever will be. And I know that you’ve got more strength, more resourcefulness, more grit, and more brave going on inside of you than you think. God made you that way. I can’t wait for you to see that version of you in action.

What are three things you’ve learned so far?

  

  

I want you to write a letter here to the Worry Whisperer. What would you want to say to him?

  

  

A Few Brave Things
to Remember