How to cope with anxiety as a teenager in 2021

Coping with anxiety as a teenager these days can be quite a challenge!

2020 threw us some wild curveballs, so it's totally understandable that you might be experiencing more anxiety in 2021 as a result.

Knowing how to cope with anxiety as a teenager in 2021 after surviving 2020 will help you not just this year, but all those future years to come.

When you can cope with anxiety as a teenager, you're building resiliency to help you cope with anxiety as an adult, too. How cool is that?

So give your future self the gift of coping with anxiety as a teenager but watching this video post which outlines an easy 5-step process.

You'll be coping with anxiety like a champ in no time!

If you prefer to watch the video, click this image here:

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If you prefer to read, here’s what you need to know about how to cope with anxiety as a teenager in 2021 (after surviving 2020):

STEP 1: SLOW DOWN

When you start to feel anxious or stressed, everything actually speeds up, because you need a lot of energy to escape the perceived danger.

We're not that different from when we were cavemen and women, and we needed to run away from that dinosaur that was chasing us. Nowadays, your stress and anxiety don't know if you are stressed out because there's a tiger chasing you, or you've got your math test coming up.

So by slowing down your physical processes, you'll actually decrease the edge on that anxiety a little bit.

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Some great strategies to slow down are:

💛 Take some slow, deep breaths.

💛 Put your back flat against something. this gives some signals to your brain and your mind that that's one less plane of existence that you have to protect against.

💛 Do a quick body scan, from the top of your head to your toes, noticing where you feel contact with your body and something else.

When you focus on what feels connected and stable, it gives signals to your brain that you're not in as much danger as it thinks you are.

STEP 2: LISTEN TO YOUR BODY

Your body will tell you exactly what it needs. So many of us, when we get really overwhelmed or stressed out, our bodies tend to heat up, so it's literally telling you that you need to cool down or chill out.

If you are somebody who heats up when you're stressed out, running some cool water on the inner part of your forearm, or getting a cool glass of water can be really helpful.

If you're somebody who actually loses body heat and gets really cold when you're stressed out, putting on an extra layer of clothing or wrapping yourself in a blanket could feel really great, too.

Your body will tell you exactly what it needs if you listen to it.

STEP 3: STAY CURIOUS

You don't want to assume that you have all the information- most times you usually don't.

When you start to fill in the blanks, which is totally normal by the way and then believe them without fact-checking, you may be feeding yourself some false information.

So a great way to practice this is to use a beginner's mind.

Try to remember what it was like not to know anything about the situation. If you were a scientist or an explorer coming across a circumstance for the very first time, what would you want to know? What would you be curious about? Is there any information that could potentially be missing?

Then ask yourself, is any of that even important to what you're trying to do here? If it's not, then you can refocus your attention on something else, sometimes we get really fixated and focus on things that are out of our control.

And we end up creating these scenarios where we're never gonna get full control of that situation, and that just leads to more stress and anxiety.

So if you keep trying to do the same thing, and it's just causing more stress, it may be time to disengage and focus on something that you can control.

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STEP 4: BE KIND TO YOURSELF

Anxiety is really stressful and overwhelming. It can be quite exhausting.

So beating yourself up for feeling anxious is just gonna make you feel worse about yourself. Being kind and gentle to yourself can be really healing here. Think about what you would do or say to a best friend who was struggling with this.

Learning to be kind to ourselves allows us to be kinder to others, too.

STEP 5: CONNECT WITH OTHERS

We are social creatures, we are not meant to undergo this stress alone. We are meant to be with other people and to have relationships with other people.

It's one of the reasons I love the Teen Growth Therapy Groups that I offer. I've seen firsthand over and over again with these teenagers, that when they are able to help other people with similar circumstances as them, they're actually learning how to improve that for themselves, too. It's really powerful stuff!

Connecting with others is a great way to learn and share experiences with each other, so you can heal on this journey together.

If you're interested in even more reasons why I love group therapy, especially for teenagers, you can check that out on this video right over here: https://youtu.be/2ll8l5EVMdA

If you found this information useful and helpful, please share it.

You never know who you could be helping!

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