Get out of your head

From Your Anxious Child: Emails to Parents Edward H. Plimpton, PhD

Helping Your Anxious Child Get Out of His Head and Out of Worry

When an anxious thought or image takes hold in your child, it hijacks his attention. In children’s intense preoccupation, a narrowly focused tunnel vision takes hold in which the worry is the only thing in sight. This narrowing of vision makes sense if there were a realistic danger that had to be dealt with. Hitting the reset button involves helping the child get out of her head and refocused onto the world around her. For example, one girl struggled watching movies with her friends because she was much more easily frightened by what she saw compared with her friends. On her own, she came up with the idea that when she was frightened by something she saw, she would look around the room and start naming what things. She would say to herself, “There is the lamp, there is the cat, there is my popcorn…” and this listing would help her reorient and gain some distance from the frightening image.

A slightly different example is provided by a 10-year-old boy who had been anxious about going to school for a long time. There were frequent trips to the school nurse and guidance counselor with complaints about stomach pains. Merely talking about his feelings and providing reassurance didn’t help with his anxiety. Partly in desperation, the guidance counselor started having the child write down his schedule in her office as soon as he got into school. By the time he was finished writing down his schedule for the day in great detail, his anxiety had diminished to the degree that he was able to go to his class without difficulty. This simple exercise did a couple of things. First, the act of writing his schedule down moved him away from his anxious thoughts because he had to think about his schedule, which was not the same every day.  Second, since he was filled with nervous anticipation about what was going to happen during the day, writing his schedule moved him away from the anxious anticipation to visualizing what would really happen during the day. This focus on the external reality of the day seemed to help calm him down. Third, the anxious child is usually operating at high speed, but writing something down can really slow things down so he can challenge some of his anxious thoughts or they can just dissipate on their own.

So helping your child focus on the environment outside of his head can often be an important step in helping him deal with anxious thoughts.