High Anxiety
I was talking to some of my students the other day about their experience of anxiety and how it feels.
What, I asked them, is it like to suffer from anxiety?
They described their anxiety in various ways - the rising panic, waves of nausea, the black fog... What they all said though is that it is always there.
Imagine that.
Imagine if that feeling that you have when faced with, say, an Ofsted inspection was your normal state of mind. Imagine if there was no let up from that colly-wobbly slightly sick feeling. That's what global anxiety disorder is like. It's exhausting to be anxious, and the more tired you are the harder it is to manage.
The trouble with global anxiety is that it is not about just one thing. It's like a big tangled mess and the sufferer doesn't know where to start unpicking it. It's one thing to be anxious about something that you can compartmentalise and quite another to just be anxious about everything. Some days everything is wrong. Everything is scary. Even getting out of bed is a huge challenge.
I asked my students what helps.
Focusing on breathing helps, they said - breathe in for a count of seven, hold for seven and then out for 11. Repeat until you feel calmer. (Try it if you don't believe me, it really works. If ever I am having trouble sleeping, a few minutes of this does the trick.)
Activities like colouring in, sudoku and word searches are good - they are soothing and calming.
Lots of them like yoga. Learning to calm the mind and body is an amazing tool.
Once the mind has stopped racing and the heart has stopped thumping quite so hard, it becomes possible to unpick the mess a little. Pull on the threads of the yarn one at a time and you find that some anxieties are quite reasonable.
Once you name your anxieties you can share them and talk things through, think about coping strategies and make a plan to deal with things one bit at a time. Getting to the point where you can do that though is really hard.
It's no wonder that the world is full of people self-medicating for anxiety with a range of substances - many of which are actually counter-productive.
Prescribed drugs can be immensely helpful of course. Someone very close to me was diagnosed with anxiety several years ago. Without the drugs he can find life very challenging and spiral into a depression quite easily. With them, he is able to recognise where his symptoms are coming from (he is anxious about Donald Trump and Brexit both of which seem reasonable things to worry about to me) and talk about them. Without the drugs he was awake all night fretting, with them, he sleeps.
To put it another way, on the Abraham-Hicks emotional scale he was existing in the orange zone and dipping down into the grey and black. Now he is living in the green.
The first time I saw this scale I was a bit cynical - it seemed a bit "knit your own muesli" to me. However, the more I listen to and observe the kids I teach, the more I see it as a useful tool.
Fear, grief and anger are states that everyone experiences: it is normal to be angry or afraid when the occasion calls for it. What is not OK is to stay angry or afraid.
The difference between healthy and unhealthy mental processing is that healthy people move out of the negative state. Unhealthy people don't.
What I have learned to do in the classroom is:
What, I asked them, is it like to suffer from anxiety?
They described their anxiety in various ways - the rising panic, waves of nausea, the black fog... What they all said though is that it is always there.
Imagine that.
Imagine if that feeling that you have when faced with, say, an Ofsted inspection was your normal state of mind. Imagine if there was no let up from that colly-wobbly slightly sick feeling. That's what global anxiety disorder is like. It's exhausting to be anxious, and the more tired you are the harder it is to manage.
The trouble with global anxiety is that it is not about just one thing. It's like a big tangled mess and the sufferer doesn't know where to start unpicking it. It's one thing to be anxious about something that you can compartmentalise and quite another to just be anxious about everything. Some days everything is wrong. Everything is scary. Even getting out of bed is a huge challenge.
I asked my students what helps.
Focusing on breathing helps, they said - breathe in for a count of seven, hold for seven and then out for 11. Repeat until you feel calmer. (Try it if you don't believe me, it really works. If ever I am having trouble sleeping, a few minutes of this does the trick.)
Activities like colouring in, sudoku and word searches are good - they are soothing and calming.
Lots of them like yoga. Learning to calm the mind and body is an amazing tool.
Once the mind has stopped racing and the heart has stopped thumping quite so hard, it becomes possible to unpick the mess a little. Pull on the threads of the yarn one at a time and you find that some anxieties are quite reasonable.
- It makes sense to be anxious about your GCSEs if you have missed a lot of school.
- It makes sense to be anxious about your sister who is having an operation tomorrow.
- It makes sense to be anxious about going to college after the sheltered environment of your PRU.
Once you name your anxieties you can share them and talk things through, think about coping strategies and make a plan to deal with things one bit at a time. Getting to the point where you can do that though is really hard.
It's no wonder that the world is full of people self-medicating for anxiety with a range of substances - many of which are actually counter-productive.
Prescribed drugs can be immensely helpful of course. Someone very close to me was diagnosed with anxiety several years ago. Without the drugs he can find life very challenging and spiral into a depression quite easily. With them, he is able to recognise where his symptoms are coming from (he is anxious about Donald Trump and Brexit both of which seem reasonable things to worry about to me) and talk about them. Without the drugs he was awake all night fretting, with them, he sleeps.
To put it another way, on the Abraham-Hicks emotional scale he was existing in the orange zone and dipping down into the grey and black. Now he is living in the green.
The first time I saw this scale I was a bit cynical - it seemed a bit "knit your own muesli" to me. However, the more I listen to and observe the kids I teach, the more I see it as a useful tool.
Fear, grief and anger are states that everyone experiences: it is normal to be angry or afraid when the occasion calls for it. What is not OK is to stay angry or afraid.
The difference between healthy and unhealthy mental processing is that healthy people move out of the negative state. Unhealthy people don't.
What I have learned to do in the classroom is:
- to recognise the signs of anxiety - the fresh self harm wounds; the jiggling legs; the repetitive scribbling; the head down on the desk
- to use settling activities that calm anxious students
- to lighten the mood with humour
Last week my go-to with one student was the "pen-pineapple-apple-pen" song. Two minutes of laughing at each other didn't cure her of her anxiety -it just broke into her thoughts so she could cope a bit better. It lifted her mood just a little.
Oh, and it cheered me up too!
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