3 Ways To Cope With Anxiety As a Teenager
Your teenage years are some of the most emotionally turbulent you’ll ever experience. Dealing with school, constant social pressure, and extracurriculars can produce anxiety in even the most even-keeled young people. It takes most adults well into their careers to truly understand their feelings, and young people often confuse emotions with reality. Here’s how to cope with anxiety, as well as a few natural remedies for anxiety in teenage girl and boys.
Talk Yourself Through The Situation
When anxiety takes hold, it can feel like the whole world is coming apart. The most important thing to realize during a panic attack is that your feelings don’t represent reality.
Anxiety is a physical response to mental changes. People originally evolved to experience this response because it helped them to survive life and death situations in the savannahs of Africa. Today, few lions are roaming our schools and shopping centers, so such extreme responses are unhelpful at best.
When you talk yourself through an anxiety incident, you separate yourself from your feelings. Tell yourself that everything is ok. Verbally go through everything that happened, but stick to the undeniable factual reality. In all likelihood, you’ve drastically overestimated the severity of your situation.
Take A Few Deep Breaths
While meditation is great for reducing your overall anxiety, but when you’re having a panic attack in a public place, you can’t exactly sit down and magically calm yourself. You can still focus on your breath, however.
If you aren’t used to observing your breath, you may not even realize how rapidly you tend to breathe when stressed. Many people also breathe in short, shallow bursts. This excites the nervous system and increases your body’s natural emergency responses.
The next time you find yourself spiraling, take a few long calculated breaths. Count to three as you inhale and five as you exhale. This extended exhale tells your nervous system that there’s no danger and it can prepare you to eat, sleep, and otherwise go about your day.
Go Through a Routine
Dealing with anxiety in the moment is a lot harder than preparing for it before it strikes. Over the counter calming medicine can balance your body’s proteins, reducing tension and irritability.
Meditation, sleep, and a proper diet can all prevent anxiety from cropping up in the first place. Though each of these can seem like impractical or insignificant solutions, consider that your feelings are all based on your physical state. The better you treat your body, the better you’ll feel.
Try starting and ending each day with a routine. As little as ten minutes of meditation each day can dramatically improve your peace of mind. Feeling relaxed at night can help you sleep, leaving you craving healthy foods in the morning. Once you get the hang of it, a healthy routine can offer you a positive feedback loop of good behaviors.
If you’ve been feeling panicky or stressed, remember that every feeling is temporary. Try combining proactive and reactive approaches to calm yourself. For the stressors you can’t prevent, try over-the-counter medication that targets the root causes of irritability and anxiety.
