Positive ways to cope with anxiety and worries

Transcript

Hi. My name is Lucy Pursell, and I’m a specialist school nurse. And today, I’d like to talk to you about positive ways to cope with anxiety and worries.

So first of all, what is anxiety and why do we feel it? Well, anxiety in humans comes from our natural response to a potential threat, and this is designed essentially to keep us safe. Today, we don’t have to hide or fight or run away from woolly mammoths, but the same responses remain. And this allows us to deal with danger if we have to, but it also allows us more positively to do things like perform on stage, in an interview, or exams.

So anxiety is a normal response to situations that are new and are challenging.

It’s important to remember that anxiety is really uncomfortable, but it’s also important to remember that we need to find positive ways to deal with it.

If anxiety is affecting how you function in your daily life, it is not normal, and you may need professional help. But now I’d like to show you some practical ways you can deal with anxiety and prevent anxiety from getting worse.

So first of all, if you think about triggers that cause your anxiety, you have a choice around triggers. So you can either avoid them altogether to reduce anxiety. So say for example, you’re really provoked to retriggered by lots of people in one place, loud noises, lots of light. So don’t go to a shopping center at Christmas time. You can make that choice to avoid that trigger.

However, you might wanna think about, actually approaching triggers directly, just going straight into them to build resilience. So say, for example, you really struggle with math. So math lessons make you feel really, really anxious.

Well, you can’t get away with not doing math for the whole of your educational career, I’m afraid. So just do it. Put yourself in that situation. And then at the end of it, reflect on it and think, do you know what?

I hate math. I’m really uncomfortable with it, but I did it. I went into the lesson. I survived it.

And, you know, next time, it’s not gonna be so bad. So when you’re thinking about triggers, think about the positives and negatives of avoiding them or just going hell for leather and putting yourself in that situation.

So let’s think about what actually happens in your body and your brain when you’re anxious. We all have very, very similar responses talking about the anxiety at the beginning of of the slides.

We all respond in a very, very similar way. So our heart rate goes up. Our breathing might become really shallow, but very rapid. We might sweat.

We might feel clammy. We might have a funny feeling in our tummy. We might feel like somebody’s sitting on our chest. We might feel shaky.

We might want to go to the loo. But it’s really important that you think about what you identify first. So what’s the first sign for you that you’re feeling anxious? Because that will allow you to introduce some of the things I’m talking about.

Because whether you’re coming across a trigger or whether you’ve just identified that, oh, I’ve got tingling in my fingers, that means my anxiety is coming on. That means that you can do breathing. So breathing is one of the most important things that you can do practically to reduce your anxiety and cope with it going forward.

So what I’d like to do with you now is actually show you how to do deep belly breathing. So not many of us are taught how to do breathing, but actually in order to counteract what I’ve just talked about, so shallow rapid breathing which makes us feel dizzy and sick.

And also if we if we breathe deeply, what we’re doing is we’re telling our sympathetic nervous system to calm down, so we’re shutting off that anxiety response.

So if you put your hands on your belly and you breathe in for four and breathe out for six, it’s really important that you breathe out really slow and long for slightly for longer than you breathe in. And what I want you to do is notice what happens to your hands on your belly.

So when you get to the top of the breath on the way in, your tummy will go out, and when you breathe out at the end, it will come in. So I’ll just do it, and then I’ll get you to do it. So I’m gonna go and so my tummy went out, and then at the end, it went in. So if you do it now with me, I’m gonna count one two three four in, and then hold quickly, and then breathe out really slowly.

One two three four five six. Brilliant. So you need to practice breathing techniques. They don’t come easily.

You need to practice, practice, practice, but deep belly breathing is brilliant. There are lots of other things that you can do. There’s alternate nostril breathing, which essentially is just imagining breathing up one side of your nostril and then breathing out the other.

Color breathing, so if you choose your two favorite colors. So if I chose purple and pink, I would imagine the most beautiful color purple coming into my mouth, going down into my lungs, filling up the entire entirety of my body all the way down to my toes. And then as I breathed out, I would imagine the most beautiful color pink coming right the way up through my body, out of my mouth, and out.

So that can be quite useful because, again, you’re sort of distracting yourself and you’re focusing on your breathing. Square breathing, it’s rectangular breathing, really.

Essentially, if you imagine in your brain that you’re starting in the left hand corner of a rectangle and you’re breathing up the short side of the rectangle, and then you’re breathing out down the long side in short, out long. So you carry on doing that. So those are some breathing techniques. And, essentially, if you allow yourself to get incredibly anxious and you’re you’re feeling absolutely dreadful, breathing is not gonna help you hugely. But if you initiate your breathing when you know you’re going into a situation that you find anxious or you’ve got those first signs of anxiety, it can be really, really helpful. So practice, practice breathing.

Grounding techniques, it’s a similar type of thing. You’re using your senses.

You’re distracting yourself, and what you’re also doing is you’re bringing yourself into into this moment, into now rather than projecting your thoughts off into the future. So, essentially, if you all just put your feet flat on the floor, put your hands on your lap, take a really deep breath in.

And what I want you to do is feel three things, which sounds a bit odd when you’re sitting still, but essentially, I can feel the material of my trousers underneath my hands.

I can feel the label on the back of my sweatshirt, and I can feel a little breeze coming from the window onto my cheek.

So that’s me feeling three things, hear three things, can’t hear a lot today, but essentially, if you’re sitting there quietly, you might hear an airplane, you might hear the wind in the trees, you might hear cars in the distance, you might hear people chatting, and see three things.

So I can see a chair.

I can see a spot on the floor. I can see a table with lots of wood on it.

Okay. So that’s grounding. So it brings you into time and space.

Just general distraction. So initiating distraction, and spending time doing things that you find distracting in your life on a daily basis is really helpful. So things like spending time with your pet, taking your dog for a walk so you can, you know, spend time with your pet and also exercise. We know that exercise allows us to produce endorphins, makes us feel good.

And doing things that slow those thoughts down, calm the mind. So drawing, painting, coloring, listening to music, distracting yourself by watching a film, taking a bath, talking to family and friends. So just general daytime things that you can you can do that you find distracting to stop you from worrying, essentially.

So visualization, is something that you need to practice, but you can use visualization at all sorts of times. You know, if you’re sitting waiting to go in into an interview, you can pick this out of nowhere, and it will allow you to calm yourself and bring yourself into a a space which allows your brain to calm, and it stops you from feeling anxious. It can be really useful to do this at night, but I’m just gonna show you what I mean by doing a little bit of a visualization session with you.

So when you do this yourself, what you can do is think of a time in your life when you felt really content and happy and safe. So wherever it was, it could have been on holiday. It could be even been in your bedroom, in your front room, with your granny, anywhere. But have a think about that. But for today, if you just look at this picture, what I’m gonna do is I’m going to try and get you to visualize being on a Caribbean island.

So what I want you to do is take a deep breath in and blow out.

Just try and relax, and I want you to close your eyes.

I want you to think of yourself standing on this beach in a Caribbean island. I want you to see yourself standing there. What are you wearing? What do you look like? Where are you standing?

And I want you to look around you. Just imagine you’re gonna look around you and what are you gonna see?

Can you see beautiful clouds skidding along a beautiful blue blue sky?

Can you feel see a turquoise sea?

Are the waves rolling in gently onto your toes?

Can you see vegetation in distance? Unusual vegetation you haven’t seen before, green and lush in the jungle in the distance.

What can you hear?

Can you hear the wind gently in the trees?

Can you hear birds, unusual birds that you’ve never come across before in the jungle behind you? Can you hear the waves lapping at the shore?

What can you feel?

Can you feel the crunch of that beautiful white fine sand beneath your toes?

Can you feel a gentle warm breeze on the top of your head?

Can you feel that amazing sunshine warming your skin and your heart?

What can you smell? Can you smell a barbecue in the distance? Can you smell the salt in the sea?

Can you taste the salt on your lips?

Now I want you to think about how you feel in that moment.

You’re standing here with the warmth of the sun and that beautiful view. Do you feel content and happy and excited and safe?

So take it all in for a minute, and then take another deep breath and open your eyes.

So you have to practice visualization. And as I say, make it adapt it to you to what makes you feel happy and safe. But when you go to bed at night, take yourself off to an island or wherever you want to, and this will allow you in the future to go there to a place and a time that you felt safe, and that will really help you with your anxiety.

So just thinking about thoughts, I think we we find it really difficult to express our thoughts.

They’re our own private things that are going on in our head, but I’m not sure that many of us realize that we are quite guilty of using negative thoughts against us. So there’s even a word for it. It’s called negative self talk.

So it’s quite useful to tap into that and know when you’re doing it, know why you’re doing it if there’s a certain trigger that might set it off. But, essentially, what negative thoughts are like and negative self talk are like is if you I don’t know. You could be in a classroom and put up your hand and you get your wrong answer, and you suddenly feel really shameful. And your thought processes will start you know, your first thought might be, I’m so stupid. And then before you know it, your thoughts have bread and bread and bread until you are just the worst person in the world, and you’re so stupid, and you’re useless, and why would anyone want to be your friend, and you’re never gonna get an exam, or you’re never gonna get a job. So all these thoughts will just escalate and escalate, and that has a really negative impact on your self esteem and how you feel.

So it’s quite important. The first step is to actually know you’re doing it, to tap into it, and think, oh, I’m doing negative self talk. I’m doing it now. And then the next step is to challenge those thoughts. So use some critical thinking for the evidence for why you’ve had that thought.

So say, for example, you thought I’m never gonna get a job. I’ve never passed an exam in my life. I’m so stupid. Well, what is the evidence for that? Have you never passed a test, never passed an exam, never done a really good piece of homework? I doubt it. So use that critical thinking.

Also, you can change the sort of focus of the thought to thinking, well, you know, what can I control? I can only try my best.

And also, you could utilize the idea of thinking about what my friend would think. So if I’m thinking I’m useless, I’m awful, I’m this, I’m that, well, would my best friend think I’m stupid, unkind, and not very generous? Well, no. They’re highly unlikely to do that. So have have an awareness of when you’re doing negative negative self talk and challenge those negative thoughts.

Just general, everyday things can be really helpful just to look after yourself, be kind to yourself. Eat a healthy diet is really, really important. Get enough sleep. We’ll bang on about sleep routines and avoiding screens, but there’s a real, you know, reason behind that.

There’s lots of research to say that if you look at screens, you’re reducing your production of melatonin, which is a hormone that helps you feel sleepy. So stay off those screens before you go to bed and get enough sleep. Get exercise every day if you can, and just treat yourself. Be kind to yourself.

Do nice things for yourself. Get into the habit of doing that. That can be really useful.

Using techniques such as relaxation, and calming the mind, through meditation and mindfulness is something that you need to practice. It takes a long time. There are people that try to meditate all their lives and still don’t do very well, but it can be really, really helpful. You know, meditation has been around for thousands of years and there’s a reason for that.

So, essentially, mindfulness is kind of part of meditation, and mindfulness is really about focusing on something without judgment. So for example, you can do daily tasks mindfully, and that would involve say, for example, you are washing your hands. We all do it. We all have to do it, and we’re very likely to be washing our hands with thinking a million thoughts at the same time.

Whereas, actually, if you mindfully wash your hands, what you’d be doing is turning on that tap and feeling what that metal feels like. What does that feel like in your hands?

And then you’re watching as the water splashes down into the sink. And then you’re putting your hands under the sink, and what does that feel like? What’s the temperature like? Then you might get some soap.

What does it smell like? And what does it feel like as you’re lathering up that soap on your hands? And what, again, does it feel like as the water washes and washes the soap off and they’re squeaky clean? So mindfully doing something is just about focusing on it with no other interruption no other interruptions and no judgment.

You can use lots of things on the Internet around meditation. There are lots of people that will guide you through meditation, and there are lots of apps that you can use, and that can be really helpful. And just using relaxation techniques quite regularly can help to relax the body and therefore relax the mind.

So using things like muscle relaxation, and that would be where perhaps if you’re lying in bed, you scrunch up your toes really, really tightly, and then you relax them. And then you work your way up and go to your calves, crunch them up, and then relax them. Do the same thing with your thighs and work all the way around your body. And what that does is it allows you to focus on something different. You’re distracting yourself, but equally, it gives you that sensation of what it feels like to be incredibly tense and then afterwards what it feels like to fully relax so you can hone in on that relaxation.

Body scan is a really useful tool so you can lie in bed and imagine that you have an imaginary pencil that’s going around each part of your body. So if you start on your right hand foot to your big toe and then you work your way around all of your toes and up the top of your foot to your ankle, then maybe up your calf to your knee, up your thigh to your hip, and, again, work your way all the way around your body. And that, again, distracts you, and allows you to focus on something. And oftentimes, people will fall asleep when they do that. So just utilizing relaxation exercises, meditation, and mindfulness can be so, so positive in your daily life.

Reducing your worry time.

So we all worry. We all feel anxious. As I said, it’s normal. But actually being proactive about the amount of time in your day that you allow yourself to worry can also be helpful. So pick a time in the in the middle of the day or when you first get home from school. Don’t wait until nighttime because once you started to worry, you might not find it very easy to stop.

But say when you come back from school, what you can do is write your worries down on pieces of paper and go through them. You can organize them. So these these worries are for my mom and dad. These worries are for my teacher. These worries are world worries. These are worries that I can do something about.

And, actually, I have no control over these other worries, so just chuck them away. But you can put them in a box if you like, and then you can take them out and add to them. But just reducing that time rather than allowing yourself to be anxious and worried all the time, just give yourself a a, you know, restricted amount of time in the day where you’re allowed to worry and no other time can be quite helpful.

Talking to friends and family. So just be aware that if you allow a little worry to sit there and you don’t share it, it will get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

Whereas if when something comes into your head and you’re, you know, I’m a bit worried about that. I don’t quite know what to do about that. Just talk to somebody. Talk to either somebody that you know loves and cares about you or talk to a professional, but just talk. You know, there’s so much evidence to say that keeping things inside us is really bad for our mental health, whereas telling people how you’re feeling is a really, really important thing to be doing in your daily life.

So this is positive strategy sorry, positive affirmations.

It’s something that some of us find quite difficult to do. I think as British people, we are quite reserved. We are quite self deprecating, meaning that we put ourselves down quite a lot. It’s part of our sort of psyche, our sense of humor.

But, actually, there’s again, there’s a lot of research to say if you sort of fake it till you make it, you think about something positively and you go, yeah. I can do that. Then, actually, you’re much more likely to be able to succeed than if you’re like, oh, never gonna be able to do that. So try positive affirmations.

So if you’re going to do something, you’ve an exam, you’ve a test, you’ve got to write your homework, whatever it is, if you’re a bit worried about it, just try it. Just say, I can do this. I’ve done it before. I’m gonna smash it.

So change those negative thoughts to positive in your mind. Even if you don’t believe it necessarily, just say it in your mind. Say it out loud.

You can do it.

Reflecting on your achievements, I think we’re really, really guilty of not, giving ourselves time and space to think about the little things that we do that we’ve done well.

So whenever you do achieve something, please, please take some time to reflect on it.

You know, it might be something really little. You might have opened the door for somebody. You might have picked something up for somebody and smiled. You might really have made a difference in someone’s day, or you might just have have done well in a piece of homework.

Anything anything at all, just allow yourself, whether it’s at the time, a bit afterwards, or in bed at night, reflect on what you’ve done, and this will allow you to build your resilience. You know, I think in today’s society, we’ve got so much pressure. We’ve got so, used to what we see on social media, and we think that our lives should be incredible and amazing, and we should be skipping through the roses every day. And, actually, that’s just not reality, and it’s not it’s not real for anybody, essentially.

You know, life can be wonderful. It can be amazing, but it’s also really, really hard. And it goes up and down and up and down and up and down, and that’s what everyone experiences.

So just please remember that some anxiety is normal, but build up your resilience slowly and surely.

If you are finding though that your anxiety is actually really affecting your daily life, then please talk to a professional. You know, we as school nurses run drop ins. We can do a six week intervention with you in school.

You can request to see the school counselor. You can go to your GP, and you can ask for a counselor there.

ChatHealth is a service that we run as school nurses where you can just text. We will text you back from nine to four thirty five days a week. And just, you know, research. Use the tools around you and and ask other people maybe what what worked for them.

And so lastly, these are some of the tools that you can utilize on the Internet. I just mentioned chat health, and that’s the number. You’ve got Childline. There’s a Samaritan’s number or, the website, and that’s if you’re feeling really suicidal, if you’re feeling really, really anxious and very, very worried.

Young Minds, cams, you can make your own referral. Your parents can make a referral. There’s NHS anxiety. Minds brilliant. Anxiety is great. And as I mentioned before, you can utilize so many things from the Internet, lots of apps, lots of things on YouTube even about positive ways of of coping with anxiety.

But just please remember, if you’re really struggling, then the first port of call would always be a school nurse. Come to the drop in. If you don’t know where it is or when it is, you can either use chat health and text us, and we will find out for you. Or you can just go to your reception in school and ask them when the school nurse drop in is.

You very much for listening.