Anxiety is a normal part of teen development that I see in my NYC therapy practice. Between college admission, SAT/ACT prep, stressors of social dynamics in and outside of high school, the first semesters of college and just being a teen, is it any wonder teens are anxious? This is all normal anxiety and this means you can take it on in a mostly self-constructed way. Do-It-Yourself (DIY) solutions aren’t only found in Home Depot, but can also help develop creative and concrete life skills that manage anxiety and let teens know they can build it themselves.
Everything is still so new when you are a teen. Adults tend to forget that while teens start to look and think more like adults, their brains are still rapidly developing, as are their emotions. They are being asked to do a lot of new things at once. It is normal to be anxious about getting a summer job, talking to college recruiters, taking on more household responsibilities, having romantic relationships and managing their own autonomy in relationships with friends, parents, teachers and mentors. This can all be anxiety-producing.
Normal anxiety is trying something new. It is talking with a new friend and feeling a little awkward, wondering if they too are enjoying hanging out. It is going on a first date or hanging out with someone you like. It is having a little trouble sleeping before the SAT or ACT. It is working on and sending off the college application. Abnormal anxiety is shaking when going into your school, not sleeping for days before a big exam, not eating for a few because your stomach just can’t settle, or feeling like you have to pace all the time because you can’t sit or are having panic attacks. What we are talking about here is the normal anxiety that every teen experiences, but that can get overwhelming because it’s all new and challenging.
Normalizing Anxiety For Teens
Normalizing anxiety is key for anyone of any age. It seems to help de-escalate a crisis and encourages someone to move from feeling stuck to being proactive. While, of course, anxiety can get out of hand, it is especially important to normalize anxiety for teens. Teens don’t yet have all the life experience to know not only how to work through anxiety, but that you can work through it and ask for help, mentorship or advice.
By normalizing anxiety for teens, you are both asserting that their feelings are important and legitimate by naming it aloud, as well as showing them that anxiety is manageable by slowing down and explaining the process. Sometimes it helps to take a breath and acknowledge that the transitions experienced by teens can be nerve-wracking.
Getting Teens To Talk Anxiety In Therapy
In my NYC therapy practice, I normalize anxiety for teens in a variety of ways. Sometimes, it’s as simple as asking what happened that day or week, asking how they felt and what their experiences looked like. If a teen is having trouble verbalizing the anxiety-producing experience, I normalize that struggle to put our feelings into words.
Of course, teens can sometimes be prickly (for a good reason) and can have a hard time sitting in the therapy room. This is why I also use creative ways to get teens to open up about their anxiety, which can include putting on music while we doodle and talk about everyday life. I’ll also share a stressor that I’ve experienced whether applying to school, chemistry class and auditioning for programs. I’ll mention how hard it was for me to be a teen and how isolated I felt, which can go a long way to showing how normal anxiety can be in these years.
DIY Development
One way that I’ve found helps teens both normalize and deal with anxiety is to encourage them to take on more responsibility for the big decisions they have to make in this transitional time. I like to call this DIY development.
DIY is a movement where we take crafting into our own hands. Learning a new craft also takes tutorials from teachers, words from parents, books and YouTube videos. And in a similar way, learning how to build our lives as teens takes both advice from those who have been there before and eventually, taking things into our own hands. We build our lives best when we learn to lead ourselves.
Of course, parents can help, but if teens are key in calling admissions offices, looking at brochures, talking to professors, this can lessen their anxiety about changes. Why? Because they are also learning ways to take on what they, at first, do not know how to do, find overwhelming or need to develop their own style on. The DIY movement is all about saying, “You can learn how to do or make something. You can lead how it gets done, what color it is and what shape it takes. It might get overwhelming, but you can do it.”
DIY-ers think both in and outside the box. The inside is simple (looking up how-tos). The outside is discovering the 5 different ways I could solve x problem. For DIY ways to take on life, thinking inside the box is relatively easy, but thinking outside the box can not only lessen anxiety, but it’s also how we learn to thrive. There is such a satisfaction teens get by doing something themselves like figuring out what college is the right fit. That is empowering. Even if they don’t know how to something, make a mistake or don’t get it quite right, they know for next time that they can do it on their own. This helps build confidence that they have what it takes.
Therapy Can Encourage Teens To DIY Develop
Therapy can give teens that extra push from someone outside the family or school. In my NYC therapy practice, I find out how they are currently working on things, what is tripping them up and what they are missing. I look at how they or other people are getting in their way to making important steps and we think together about how they can take on more responsibility for themselves whether talking to a college admissions officer, a teacher or advisor. It is always a fine line between being involved as a parent with a child under 18 and letting the teen lead and learn. We often say in our NYC practice that we speak parent, which can help guide a teen’s effort to DIY it. And, DIY works best when parents let the therapist, teacher and teen do their magic. This usually has an immediate calming effect on anxiety.
In addition to creating interventions together, I work to give teens the tools to formulate these on their own as well. This looks like helping teens reorganize their thoughts, especially if they’re not kind to themselves. “I can’t do this,” “My mom can do this better and should do this not me,” and “I’m stupid” are all things I hear. This DIY form of self-development asks teens what they can take on for themselves, utilizing their strengths, resources and learning to create new things. I encourage teens’ ability to learn, lean on resources or relationships and then, learn how to craft this new skill of self-advocacy to approach the different challenges they may face.
