Mental Health Minutes: Anxiety
Welcome to another edition of Mental Health Minutes with Meaghan, School Counselor.
This month, the spotlight is on ANXIETY.
Picture this: you are walking in the woods and you see a black bear up ahead on the trail. Before you are fully aware of what is happening, the part of your brain (the amygdala) that is responsible for activating your Fight, Flight, Freeze (F3) response is already hard at work. The amygdala has quickly checked in with your memory center (hippocampus), “Have we experienced this before? What happened last time?” and then sends signals throughout your body to prepare your relevant systems to either fight the bear, run from the bear or freeze. At the same time, your prefrontal cortex has been effectively ‘taken offline’ so that your executive functioning skills are temporarily not available. You are then locked into the F3 response, yell “HEY BEAR” while making lots of noise and, eventually, find yourself back at your car, full of adrenaline. Now imagine that a week later you are walking on the same trail and you see a tree that, at a quick glance, LOOKS like a bear - your amygdala, trying to be protective and focused on survival, activates your F3 response and you have the same reaction that you did when you saw the actual bear. When the amygdala activates the F3 response when we are not in danger, it effectively ‘hijacks’ our ability to use the rational and ‘thinking’ parts of our brain. In order to access the rational parts of our brain so that we can process our experience, we first need to tend to our nervous system and reduce our anxious response. Practicing grounding and mindfulness techniques when you are not experiencing a F3 response may allow you to access those strategies more easily when a threat in your environment is first detected.
Anxiety often emerges for kids during times of transition, stress, changes to family structure and when they become aware of the world around them (typically around age 4/5). Anxious symptoms are experienced internally and displayed externally. Children often have a difficult time verbalizing their anxious feelings and do not always recognize their experience as an anxious response. As a caregiver, you might experience your child’s anxious symptoms as school refusal, asking to be picked up early from an event and arguing when it is time to go to sleep. When we view those scenarios through the ‘F3 response’ lens, we understand our child’s school refusal as a “fight” or “freeze” response and their phone call home to be picked up early from an event that they were anxious to attend as a “flight” response. When a child presents with a F3 response, it is important to first reduce their anxious symptoms before trying to reason with them or present facts about the particular situation.
Providing children with psycho-education related to the F3 response is a helpful way to introduce the topic and will allow you to explore how the F3 response shows up for your child. Somatic symptoms of the F3 response are important to explore with your child in an effort to increase awareness of how anxiety shows up in our bodies and how anxious parts are trying to be helpful/protective in those instances. For example, we might feel anxious and our amygdala might activate our F3 response before a group presentation. Now our heart is racing, our palms are sweaty and we are experiencing nausea. This response would be helpful if what we were experiencing was a threat to our survival and is not as helpful when we are feeling nervous about talking in front of people.
In the small groups that I am currently holding/will hold for other classes as the year progresses, we will learn about the F3 response and will explore examples that kids experience in their everyday lives. We will explore coping strategies and use psycho-education to learn more about somatic symptoms and how to recognize when our F3 response has been activated.
Stop by the mental health bulletin board for more information on Anxiety and make sure to take a handout that outlines more strategies to help support your kiddo if they are experiencing anxious symptoms!
In short, here’s how your body reacts to the perceived threat: (copied from psychcentral)
The amygdala picks up a cue from the environment that signals danger.
It gathers the information and sends it to the sympathetic nervous system, which controls your body’s involuntary responses. In other words, you don’t have to think about it; the body just reacts.
Your adrenal glands receive a signal to pump adrenaline, the fight-or-flight hormone, into your blood.
Adrenaline releases blood sugar and fat from storage sites around your body into your blood, giving you a boost of energy.
Adrenaline also increases your heart rate, pulse, and blood pressure. This blood reaches your vital organs, heart, and muscles. It prepares you in case you need to run, jump, or react in another way.
Small airways in your lungs open wide, and you start to breathe more quickly.
Your brain receives extra oxygen, making it more alert, and your senses become sharper.