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Health & Fitness

Dealing with School Anxiety

A quick and easy tool for helping students deal with anxiety.

Unfortunately it is coming…that first day of school. The morning routines and school lunch making, the early wake ups and requests for five more minutes.  If your kids are like I was as a student…they are excited.  I was the kids who, with two weeks to go before school started, would sit at the kitchen table with all my new school supplies and wish that I had something to write on those clean pages.  However, I am fully aware that not all kids are like I was.  Many kids struggle with anxiety about school.  For the youngest students there are so many unknowns, for those in middle school there are so many social pressures and in high school there is the feeling that they are growing up and the life they have always known is about to change forever and then there are the anxieties about the academics at all levels.

Anxiety is real and might come off as laziness, stubbornness or just plain not wanting to. However anxiety looks, it is very important to help kids to handle it. Once you have determined what the problem is, giving students tools to relieve the anxiety is very important.  When I work with students as an Academic Life Coach, I have them do an exercise called Dropping Anchors.  This exercise is intended to remind students of examples of when they were not anxious and use an action or word to recall those feelings in times when they are feeling anxious.  Here is an example.  I had a student who was getting ready to take the SAT’s and was very nervous about how he would do. He knew that if he stayed nervous he would not be able to do his best work so we created his anchor of tapping his toe.  We discussed all sorts of times in his life when he was successful and while discussing those times, he tapped his toe.  When we were done, he now associated toe tapping with feeling really good about himself.  I received a text from him after his SAT’s that said he felt really good about them and that he had used his anchor to reduce his anxiety and it had worked!

This tool is such a great one for everyone and can be used for any uncomfortable feeling.  Anxiety doesn’t have to control your house, just take a minute and drop an anchor (or help your child to) and move on to have an excellent school year!

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