by Sissy Goff
Coping Skills
I want you to think, for a moment, about emotions on a 1 to 10 scale. When was the last time you went to a 10?
What helped you calm back down?
Whatever it was is actually a coping skill for you. One of the best things we counselors ever do is help you realize what coping skills work best for you. My guess is that you already know what they are. I want you to list twenty of your favorite coping skills here. They can be coping skills that are productive, or not so much. Include a few of both. Maybe don’t include scrolling through social media or eating or things that can sometimes end up hurting more than they help, or even get us into an addictive situation. But what makes a difference for you when you’re at a 10—whether it’s a worried 10, a sad 10, an angry 10, or any other kind of 10?
Sleep
Yes, I said it. And you need it. You need it even in the midst of final exams. You might especially need it after a sleepover. Sleep deprivation increases activity in the amygdala. In other words, the Worry Whisperer is a lot louder when you haven’t gotten enough sleep. I’ve noticed that sleep makes me feel better physically and emotionally. Getting a good night’s sleep is sometimes the only thing that gets me out of a funk. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, sleep “recharges your brain and improves your focus, concentration, and mood.”10
Studies say that you need between nine and nine and a half hours of sleep per night in your teenage years. Do you know how much studies say that you get? Between seven and seven and a quarter hours.11 That’s not enough. What would you say you average? Research also says—you know what I’m about to say—you need to get off screens at least an hour before you go to bed. Sorry, but it’s one of those things that really is backed by research. When you keep looking at your screen, the light keeps your brain from producing the melatonin that tells your body it’s time to go to sleep. So you have a harder time falling asleep and are often more restless once you get there. “Sleep is brain hygiene,” says Dan Siegel, a psychologist I really respect.12 He says that when we don’t get enough sleep, “the glial cells that are crucial for cleaning up the neurotoxins that build up in our brains . . . can’t do their jobs.”13 The toxins just stay. Inadequate sleep also
impacts our focus,
impairs our memory,
lessens our ability to problem-solve, and
affects our insulin, causing us to gain more weight from what we eat and to eat more.
I don’t know about you, but those things make me want to get more sleep.
Dan Siegel, along with a guy named David Rock, have another idea that I think is really important for us both. They call it a healthy mind platter. It’s a little like the food groups you learned about in science, but it’s for your mind. David Rock says these are the “seven daily essential mental activities for optimum mental health.”14 I would also say they’re seven activities that help keep the Worry Whisperer quieted down. They’re what we could call preventative practices in this war against worry. I wrote about them in the book for your parents (if your family routine changed after they read that book, now you know why).
Here’s what was in their book:
Focus time is time that your daughter spends focusing on specific tasks, which challenge and give her brain opportunities to make connections. Schoolwork would be a primary place for her to have focus time. Learning or practicing a skill is also focus time.
Play time . . . strengthens her problem-solving and cognitive abilities, at the same time decreasing stress. In play, she uses her executive functioning skills in planning the play, and she uses a whole host of other skills, such as adaptability and intentionality, in executing it. It also teaches her to handle frustration and creates more flexibility. . . . So play not only lowers her stress in the short-term but teaches her skills to prevent stress in the long-term.
Connecting time is time for your daughter to relate to others and the world around her. Relationships strengthen the connections in her brain and help her discover more of who she is. Connecting time can be with family, friends, pets, or nature. All are important to her growing body and mind. . . .
Physical time is a significant deterrent and antidote to anxiety. Exercise releases endorphins, which are neurotransmitters produced in the brain that reduce pain. Exercise also increases the serotonin in her brain, which is often known as the “happy chemical.” Over thirty minutes of exercise yields the greatest results. . . .
Time in is basically time for your daughter to reflect. This time can include mindfulness but cannot include screens. It’s where she has space for the creative and reflective thoughts that kids need to de-stress and to grow. Having quiet time, reading, writing, and creating through art are all examples of time in.
Down time is non-focused time. It’s the deliberate doing nothing and “being bored” that . . . is a rite of passage for kids. Down time is an important part of children learning to entertain and problem-solve for themselves. It’s also often the first to go in a busy schedule. . . . This time is lying in bed before sleep, relaxing in the bath, sitting on a swing in the yard. Down time recharges the brain’s batteries and helps it “store information in more permanent locations, gain perspective, process complicated ideas . . .” according to Stixrud and Johnson.
Sleep time is needed for optimal brain growth. Anxiety is worsened by frequent sleep deprivation. The authors of The Yes Brain explain, “Adequate sleep is necessary to allow the inevitable toxins of the daytime’s neural firing to be cleaned up so we can start the day with a fresh, cleaned-up brain!”15
Now let’s go back to my office. I want us to create a pseudo report card for your healthy mind platter. Here’s what I want you to do: Write the type of time in the first column and the hours you think you spend each week doing them in the second.
Next, I want you to go back and give yourself a letter grade on each type of time. How’s it going? Mine is honestly not so great. I’m more of a focus and less of a physical kind of a girl. I literally felt so convicted writing about this that I just got up and walked Lucy for thirty minutes. I also needed to reset my brain because I was getting anxious about my writing deadline and how much I have left. It helped. I came back fresh. All of us could improve in these areas, but they’re good goals. And they’re preventative. We want to continue to think about preventative practices we can use against the Worry Whisperer.
Really, we want three types of practices: preventative, immediate, and lasting. We covered the preventative and immediate practices in this chapter. You know what to do preventively to keep your amygdala and body in a healthy place so that the Worry Whisperer has less opportunity.
Name three of those things here:
You know what to do in the immediate to stop the false alarms in your brain, body, and emotions so that the Worry Whisperer has less impact.
Name three of those things here:
Now let’s talk about change. It’s about more than just prevention or help in the moment. It’s about learning to think differently. It’s about being freed up from the thoughts that can so easily consume our minds and our hearts and keep us from being who we want to be. It’s about lasting change. And that change is coming. Keep reading.
What are five things you’ve learned in this chapter you want to remember?
What are five things you would tell a friend?
A Few Brave Things
to Remember
It’s important to pay attention to how anxiety affects your body. The sooner you catch it, the easier it is to stop it. And the more you learn about worry’s ways, the easier it is to fight it.
The first place the Worry Whisperer comes after you is your body. He hijacks your amygdala, which reacts with fight, flight, or freeze. To beat the Worry Whisperer, we have to start by calming down the amygdala.
The more frequently the amygdala sets off a false alarm, the more likely it is to do so. Your brain gets better at whatever it practices, including worry.
&nb
sp; Your best tools to fight the Worry Whisperer in your body include knowing your triggers, listening to your body, breathing deeply, playing grounding games, practicing mindfulness and memorizing Scripture, moving, going to your space, using your coping skills, and sleeping.
Deep breathing resets the amygdala, calming down the false alarm.
Grounding games help pull you out of the worry loop and bring you back to the present.
Mindfulness helps you focus on what’s happening around and inside of you. Memorizing and reciting Scripture gives the added benefit of calming your worries AND reminding you of truth that can fight those worries at a much deeper level.
Coping skills help you find outlets to express your worry and whatever emotions might be lying underneath it in healthy, constructive ways.
5. Help for Your Mind
Several years ago, I went to a conference on a counseling topic. I can’t remember what it was anymore. I guess it didn’t make a lasting impact. But out of the six hours I spent sitting in that auditorium, there are five minutes I do remember.
The man leading the conference had just started speaking. He was introducing himself and talking about his credentials when a woman loudly entered the auditorium. When I say loudly, I mean she was hollering from the moment she walked in and continued as she marched down the aisle and right onto the stage with him. Honestly, at first, I thought she was crazy. She was shouting things like, “What business do you have being up there? You don’t have anything helpful to say. They’re not going to listen to you. You don’t even look like you know what you’re talking about, let alone sound like it. You should have just stayed home.” I’m not kidding. She was saying these things to the man leading the conference loudly enough for everyone to hear. I was shocked. And so was he, obviously. At first, he was kind to her, saying things like, “Thanks for your thoughts on that,” and he would try to keep talking. Then he started nervously saying, “I’m not sure you’re in the right place. I’m going to need you to sit down.” The more she came after him, though, the more he shrunk back. By the end of her tirade, she had taken center stage and he had faded into the background.
What do you think happened next?
I was on the edge of my seat. She stopped, smiled, and introduced herself to the audience. She said, “I’m the voice in your head.”
Wow.
In other words, she was his Worry Whisperer. She sounded a lot like mine too. Probably yours as well. Her words were representative of what his thoughts sound like once the Worry Whisperer has taken control.
The Other Pathway to Worry
Let’s have another quick Anxiety Brain 101 lesson. In the body chapter we talked a lot about how the amygdala region of your brain impacts your body. The amygdala is one pathway to anxiety. It’s the path that’s taken when the person is banging on the door to my office. We could call it the Worry FastPass. With the Worry FastPass, the false alarm sounds in the amygdala, the sympathetic nervous system kicks into gear, and logical, rational thought goes out the window. The prefrontal cortex is shut down and you’re in full-blown looping anxiety land. It all happens in less than a second. There’s no thinking. There is only reacting that temporarily turns off thinking.
But there is another path the Worry Whisperer takes. It’s the path that starts with thoughts. It involves the cortex, which includes your prefrontal cortex. The cortex is what you traditionally picture when you picture the brain—all of that gray, squiggly matter. It has lots of regions and lots of functions, including memory, language, creativity, judgment, attention, and emotion. And it’s another path the Worry Whisperer can use to get to you.
The cortex path is different from the amygdala. The cortex path starts with a thought—often an intrusive thought.
I wonder if I’m going to get sick.
I wonder if someone I love might get cancer.
I wonder if I’ll fail my test.
I wonder if my friends are mad at me.
Write down three thoughts you’ve had lately that are these kinds of worried wonderings.
The thought comes out of nowhere. Or maybe it comes out of a perception or misperception, which we’ll come back to later. We all have dozens, or potentially even hundreds, of intrusive thoughts per day.1 On a good day, those thoughts just drift right by, like waves on an ocean. Or they do that when we’re practicing the mindfulness exercise that helps us send them drifting by like waves on an ocean.
But on certain days—or for some of us, during certain hours in a day—they take hold. We stop and notice those thoughts, ruminating on them (which we’ll come back to later as well). Basically, they get stuck. Then those thoughts kick-start our amygdala onto its well-worn path to trouble.
The amygdala is always involved, unless we can teach our cortex to override it, which is the goal of this chapter. But just like we talked about in the last chapter, we’ve got to learn the Worry Whisperer’s tricks to better understand where to fight him. And again, sooner is stronger. So let’s start with what he does when he comes after your very smart and capable mind.
The Worry Whisperer’s Tricks for Your Mind
The amygdala reacts. It impacts our brain, our body, and our emotions and pretty much creates chaos in all of the above. The Worry Whisperer is actually fairly obvious to track down in those areas, which makes it easier to shut him down with the right tools. But he’s sneakier in the cortex. He comes after the ways we think . . . which only take place inside of our head. And if we’re not careful, those voices inside of our head will be voices we believe as truth.
The cortex is where we anticipate . . . believing we’re preventing problems before they happen. This kind of anticipation is really just dread.
The cortex is where we ruminate . . . believing we can think through whatever scenario that might present itself. But this kind of rumination is really just overthinking that quickly turns into obsessing.
The cortex worries. I’m not sure how we think worrying will help, but we do it anyway. This kind of worry really just exacerbates and prolongs anxiety.
The cortex is where we hear the voices of criticism, rejection, doubt, and guilt. It’s where we hear that things aren’t complete, that things aren’t okay . . . that we’re not okay.
The cortex is just another area where the Worry Whisperer lies. He’s wrong—once again. But until we learn to recognize his voice, we will believe it as truth.
Anticipation
Most anxiety happens before an event ever takes place. And the worry over the event is usually worse than the event itself. It’s called anticipatory anxiety. We could just call it dread. I have a friend who wakes up every day with a sense of dread. I hate it for her. Her first thoughts are about all of the bad things that are likely to happen that day. I playfully call her Eeyore. She has those “slight chance of rain” kinds of thoughts more often that she would like.
The thing is, for anyone who struggles with anxiety, the slight chance of rain means that it will rain. Possibility becomes a high probability. The Worry Whisperer shifts fear to fact.
“You will fail your test.”
“You will have a panic attack at your next track meet.”
“Your mom will get cancer and then die.”
“Your friends will betray you.”
It’s called an exaggerated likelihood. You’re not just worried about the bad thing happening. You’re certain of it. The Worry Whisperer makes you feel like the bad things are inevitable and that you should just go ahead and prepare yourself for the worst. And then it sure feels like the worst happens.
When you find yourself in a state of dread, I want you to ask yourself the following question: “What really is the likelihood that this is going to happen?”
Perception
I know a girl named Sophie who struggles a lot with friends. I’ve known Sophie for about six months, and I honestly can’t figure out why she struggles in that area. She’s delightful. She’s smart and creative and funny and kind. The only thing I’ve
been able to come up with is that she’s just too mature for her years and her peers. They don’t get her. So I decided to put Sophie in group counseling so she could find some girls who do get her.
Sophie started group counseling and tried really hard with the other girls. They responded immediately with enthusiasm. I could tell they liked her. They even talked about getting together outside of counseling. Week after week, Sophie would ask great questions of the girls. One week, she approached me after group and said that the girls didn’t ask her very many questions back. I thought about it, and she was right. What she thought was that they didn’t care. What I knew as a counselor was that they were just being narcissistic teenage girls (although kind ones). They did like her. They just weren’t as good at asking questions.
A few weeks later, Sophie told me that no one had reached out to get together with her after they had mentioned it in group. She thought they didn’t like her after all. What I knew was that it was the spring semester and these girls all had too many activities on their plates, and they were just narcissistic teenage girls (yes, still kind).
Several weeks went by again. Sophie’s dad called me. Sophie felt like the other girls didn’t like her. She said they would walk right by her and not speak when they came into group counseling and leave without saying good-bye. She thought that not only did they not like her, but they didn’t want her to be in the group. What I knew, as a counselor, is that they do the very same thing to me. Sometimes I walk in and say, “Hello, everyone,” and when they don’t respond to me, I just go ahead and say, “It’s time for you to now say hello back to me.” It’s not that these girls don’t care, it’s that . . . yep, they’re kind, narcissistic teenage girls.
