Anxiety in School

There's something about the word 'anxiety' that seems to underplay just how bad the emotion behind it can get. If you hear someone describe themselves as 'anxious' it tends to call to mind something akin to mild nervousness. Something far less severe than what words like 'fear' and 'terror' will conjure.

However, as anyone who suffers from significant anxiety will tell you, anxiety can be paralysing. Anxiety is our brain and body anticipating a threat, so they both respond accordingly. To be sure, this is a useful reflex to have. If there is something which may become a threat to you, it's important to be able to anticipate it and be ready to respond. And in the animal kingdom, someone with a high affinity for anxiety is hugely valuable, as they pick up on threats that more relaxed members of their packs would miss until it's too late.

Unfortunately, while that was the environment anxiety evolved to deal with, environments humans deal with are radically more complex. Essentially, anxiety is designed to deal with short term problems, not long term ones. But none of this changes the fact that if you have problems with anxiety, you can't just uninstall it like a faulty smartphone app. Not that there aren't ways to handle anxiety, but these ways are good habits which you have to learn. And, like all good habits, the earlier you learn them, the better.

Which is why we should talk about anxiety in school. Not just because school is where you learn things, but because it's also where children find plenty of reasons to be anxious. This shouldn't really come as a huge surprise when you stop to consider it. School is where children (who are not known for being universally reasonable) are gathered together and made to do things they often don't enjoy. The fact that it's apparently important to their future adds more stress as well. All of these factors make school a crucial battleground for deciding how well a child learns to handle their anxiety.

The first, and arguably fundamental, challenge to handling anxiety is learning to identify what you're feeling, and why. This can be deceptively difficult to do, as we've had our emotions as long as we've been alive. So, like anything which has 'always' been there, our emotions are easy to overlook. They drive us without us really needing to consider the finer points of them. At least not consciously. So it can be a good idea to provide an exercise that allows them to explore what they're feeling and put it into words. If they're struggling with this, then practise makes perfect. Putting together a system that lets them communicate how they're feeling each day will get them in the habit of considering how they feel.

If you're looking for a more all-purpose means of learning to handle anxiety, then you might want to consider mindfulness. This is the practise of focusing the mind on what you're doing in the current moment. You don't worry about the past, or stress about the future, you just focus on what you're doing. And if this brings meditation to mind, that's understandable. Mindfulness is traditionally pursued through meditation. However, if you don't want to try introducing meditation sessions into your classroom schedule, there are other ways to go about it. Really any non-complex task can work as long as you focus your attention on it. Which is why colouring is an excellent way to engage children in mindfulness.

There are plenty of other activities for helping children to manage their anxiety. It can be frustrating, being faced with a problem like someone else's anxiety, as it's not a problem you can 'fix'. But you can support children to learn to manage their own anxiety. Just and time and patience.