How to Control School Morning Anxiety Attacks

School Morning can be the absolute WORST!

Knowing how to control school morning anxiety attacks can wildly improve your day!

In this video, I am sharing 5 therapist-approved coping skills to help you control those morning anxiety attacks.

→Click Here to watch this video on YouTube←

While this video focuses on school mornings, you can certainly use these on any morning you anticipate struggling to cope with anxiety attacks.

And though this particular batch of coping skills has been helpful for the teens I work with who struggle with morning anxiety attacks, you can also definitely use these healthy coping skills at any point in the day, too (not just for morning anxiety).

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If you prefer to read, here’s what you need to know about controlling your school morning anxiety with these 5 coping skills:

GROUND YOURSELF

No, I don't mean punish yourself and lock yourself in a room.

That's actually probably the worst thing that you could do for school morning anxiety.

I mean to physically ground yourself, to the present moment.

One of the reasons that grounding works so well for school morning anxiety is because a lot of times our anxiety is anticipatory. We start anticipating that whatever situation is coming up or plan to come up next, it's going to be really threatening to some aspect of ourselves.

When that happens, we can get really stuck in our thinking in our heads and in the future. So if you can bring yourself right back down to the present moment, that can really help you control your school morning anxiety.

Try focusing on this moment, this class, this task that you need to do. Whether that is brushing your teeth, getting on the school bus, or even tying your shoes. These are all some great ways to focus on now.

SELF SOOTHE

While you may be using one or more of your five senses to ground yourself, you can also use them to self-soothe.

So when you self-soothe your physical responses to stress or anxiety, you give signals to your brain that, oh, you can relax a little bit.

You don't have to be so on guard and protective.

Some ways that you can do this include:

🧴 Rubbing lotion on your arms or hands

🎧 Listen to calming or soothing music

😶‍🌫️ Put on your favorite perfume or cologne.

Whatever is going to shift you out of that future thinking and into the present moment. You got this!

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MOVE YOUR BODY

We know that our physical bodies hold a lot of our emotional and mental stress.

One of my favorite ways to move my body is to just dance around in my room.

I actually do this in between sessions sometimes when I need to burn off some energy.

You can also shake it out or even just take a few moments to stretch and move around.

SELF CARE MAINTENANCE

Self-care is usually touted as this very luxurious, glamorous kind of self-care. Like taking a bubble bath or indulging in your favorite treat.

And yes some of that is self-care though, I would actually call that pampering ourselves or rewarding ourselves. which is an important aspect of self-care too.

We all deserve rewards and we all deserve some pampering from time to time.

But the self-care that I'm talking about is that kind of boring daily maintenance self-care. Like making sure that you eat nutritiously throughout the day and making sure that you brush and floss your teeth. That's the kind of self-care that I'm talking about.

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I like to check in on my self-care, using the acronym STRONG which stands for:

→ Sleep

→ Taking your medication as prescribed

→ Restorative rest or routine

→ One thing at a time

→ Nutrition

→ Get moving

You probably will notice that your stress level or anxiety tends to eek up a little bit if you're not really taking care of one or more of these areas.

Now you don't have to be an all-star 100% of the time across all of these areas.

In fact, that's probably a rarity, but if you notice yourself slipping in one area, just think about how you can make an incremental upgrade. Maybe tonight you'll make sure to wash your face before you go to bed.

POSITIVE SELF TALK

And of course, you already know that your mind believes whatever you tell it. So if you are continuing to feed that anxiety train reminding yourself of all the reasons that you have to feel anxious, and that leads to avoiding going to school or controlling your morning anxiety, then that's not going to be useful and helpful.

Trust me, your mind and your body do not need any more help remembering the negative things.

What you need to focus on instead is improving your positive self-talk. It can take five positive statements to counteract a negative one. So remember that.

One of the things that I find really useful and handy is reciting positive affirmations. I have a great video that you can check out right here if you'd like some help with that:

→  Click here to practice 20 positive affirmations to cope with your morning anxiety with me.

If you found the information in this video useful and helpful, you know what to do, go ahead and share it.

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