worry: 5 Articles

Being a teenager is hard enough, but the COVID-19 pandemic has added new aspects of uncertainty, isolation, and potential danger to the challenges teens navigate. Is your teen experiencing run-of-the-mill worries, or dealing with a pattern of excessive anxiety? In this repost from January 2018, you can explore the difference and find some tips to help you spot signs of anxiety in teens. For many parents, it’s difficult to understand whether your teenager is feeling worried over routine events and situations—a fallout with a friend, perhaps—or experiencing more significant symptoms of anxiety. The teen years are full of stressful moments that warrant some worrying, and teens sometimes even relish and thrive on the modern-day stress culture. For example, a teen saying, “Ugh, I have so much work to do!” could consider it a badge of honor. But roughly 31 percent of teens in the U.S. experience more extreme symptoms that constitute an anxiety disorder.1 For these teens, the symptoms go beyond the occasional sleepless night or emotional outburst, signaling an underlying condition. So, how do you know the difference between an appropriate amount of worry and possible excessive anxiety? What is the difference between anxiety and worry? It’s normal for teenagers (and people of all ages) to worry from time to time—it makes sense to feel worried before the first day of school, for example. In some instances, feeling some anxiety about a situation can actually help keep us safe. Imagine that you encounter a large, snarling dog during a walk; your mind starts to get anxious and communicates a feeling of danger, and you slowly back away. What escalates those worries into unhelpful anxiety is when your mind tells you that a situation is dangerous when it isn’t, or when the chance of danger is very small or unlikely. That communication causes your body to react as if the danger is real. One way to think of it: Replace the large, snarling dog in the previous example with a tiny Chihuahua, but imagine that your body responds with the same fight-or-flight reaction. In that instance, you’re experiencing unhelpful anxiety. What are some anxiety symptoms in teens? For teenagers throughout every generation, much of the anxiety they experience revolves around being left out or being judged by their peers. But this generation of teenagers also faces the relatively new phenomenon of social media pressures. Bundled together, it can be a lot to handle and can result in anxiety. Typically, most anxiety and fears diminish or disappear in less than six months. If your teen has been feeling anxious off and on for a long time, or if the anxiety doesn’t pass in a few days, it can be considered excessive. In teenagers, anxiety is typically made up of three components: an anxious mind, an anxious body, and anxious actions. These three components feed off of each other, and create a system we refer to as the Worry Wheel. The Worry Wheel starts when your teen experiences a thought that makes