October is for talking about anxiety

What is Anxiety? Anxiety is excessive worry or fear about daily situations. Rapid heart rate, heavy breathing, issues sleeping, and sweating may occur.

How do I explain Anxiety to my child? There are many ways a child can understand anxiety and many ways a parent can explain it. One of the ways I explain it to one of my children is visually because she understands things better that way. While my other child would prefer to learn about things verbally and by song. While I don’t expect most parents to make up a song every time, they want to explain something to their child. I do encourage you to get to know how your child absorbs information.

Why is anxiety so important to talk about? Well, that’s easy. We are all born with anxiety. While I’m not a medical perfectional studies show that everyone gets a heightened form of anxiety when they get into a stressful situation. For instance, when a baby excessively cries because they are hungry, they will start to worry that food is not coming because babies cannot differentiate the facts that food is coming it’s just going to take a minute. All the baby knows is that its hungry and it needs food which means it should happen now and when it doesn’t, they cry. It’s not a bad thing, it’s a survival thing.

Another example is if you take a test, you get nerves, become afraid you’ll fail, did you study enough, will you pass? You may have studied for a month for the test but still have all these irrational fears. That’s anxiety.

Showing up to your first day of work for a new job. Will people like you? Did you dress up too much? Did you walk into the wrong room? Was it a mistake to not pack a lunch? Will you get fired on your first day?

While all these fears are irrational, and you know that they will still pop up in your head at one point or another. This is anxiety and it is completely normal as long as we teach our children the coping skilling to keep it an irrational fear that pops up and leaves their brain and they don’t allow it to linger. When we allow anxiety to linger and imbed itself into our brain it then becomes a real fear. Then anxiety becomes real. Then you're now dealing with an anxiety disorder which is what I have.