Helping Students to Thrive with Anxiety (instead of getting rid of it)

Dr. David Rosmarin

This past July and August, I was training for a fall road race and I went for several runs outside in the heat of the summer days. I struggled through each run, with my legs and lungs burning at times, and my pace slowing from what I had expected by over a minute per mile. It was literally painful at times! And I loved every minute because I knew that my fitness was growing by leaps and bounds with each step. Indeed, when the temperatures started to cool, I was substantially fitter and faster, and well-prepared for my race.

We expect certain challenges to be difficult – hard workouts, studying for challenging tests/exams, completing prestigious internships, and the like – since we recognize these as growth opportunities to expand our strengths and capabilities. But we typically do not approach our emotions in the same way.
On the contrary, for a variety of cultural reasons, we expect our emotions to be pleasant most, if not all, of the time. When we feel the uncomfortable feelings of anxiety on the rise, we expect to achieve resolution quickly and easily with simple approaches like relaxation and self-care. While these can be helpful tools in some instances, the point remains that we don’t have much tolerance for anxiety.
This is the main reason why we have an anxiety epidemic today: The moment we feel off-kilter and anxious, we interpret our feelings as a threat to our well-being, which increases the flow of adrenaline into our bloodstream, and our anxiety compounds.

We need to change our relationship with anxiety. We need to recognize that challenging feelings can help us to develop emotional strength, resilience, and fortitude. We also need to realize that humans are emotional beings. At some point, all of us have feelings that get overwhelming and distressing. Yes, dealing with these emotions is hard work, sometimes even harder than running in 90+ degree heat! But that isn’t a bad thing.

Reframing Anxiety for Students

Teenagers and young adults are at particular risk for high levels of anxiety due to the above-mentioned reasons. Normal, healthy, low levels of anxiety are interpreted as a failure of the psyche, and distressing feelings quickly compound into acute distress. Youth today are quick to judge themselves for being emotional failures (e.g., “Why doesn’t everyone else feel this way?”) as opposed to understanding that anxiety, stress, and other challenging feelings are simply a part of life.

Mental health programming in schools is abundant and typically focused on helping students reduce their distress, cope with their anxiety, ameliorate feelings of sadness, and manage their emotions more effectively. The subtext message of these well-intentioned programs is that students should not feel anxious, and if they do feel anxious it’s important to reduce their distress. I am concerned that this message is reinforcing the above-mentioned cycle, and inadvertently worsening the anxiety epidemic.

I believe we need to change our approach to mental health education and teach students how to tolerate hard emotions. Just as we encourage students to confront and even embrace physical, academic, and other challenges in life, we need to help them build their emotional muscles and increase their capacity to tolerate hard feelings.

I recognize that it’s not easy to watch anyone struggle with anxiety, particularly children and adolescents. But we must recognize that our current approach is not working. The US Surgeon General has pointed out that nearly half of high school students report persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness. Other data suggests that one in five high school students are engaging in non-suicidal self-injurious behaviors in response to emotional distress. Perhaps most concerning of all, suicide is the second leading cause of death among youth today.

I believe these trends are occurring because our culture’s approach to handling anxiety has a deep flaw. We desperately try to get rid of anxiety, instead of embracing it as an opportunity to strengthen our emotional fortitude. We seek day and night to decrease and remove uncertainty – everything needs to be predicted and controlled today – instead of understanding and accepting that many aspects of life are inherently uncertain. Perhaps even more relevant to youth, parents, teachers, and administrators tend to do everything they can to ensure that children don’t feel anxious. All of these trends are robbing students of the opportunity to grow from life’s challenges.

Ironically, instead of providing certainty and stability, these efforts have made the anxiety epidemic worse. By emphasizing the need to get rid of anxiety, we pathologize what is often a completely normal response to stressful situations. Anxiety, after all, is just our body’s fight-or-flight system kicking in to help us deal with a potential threat. Simply seeing something as something to get rid of enhances our fear of it, thus causing us to feel anxious about anxiety itself.

Making it Practical
How can we help students to embrace, rather than escape their anxiety? Here are five concrete strategies:

1. Talk about your own anxieties with your students. Model for them that it’s normal to feel anxious, whether it’s about an upcoming test, starting the new school year, social situations, the climate, or other common worries. Speak openly about times that you have felt uncomfortable and how you didn’t let those feelings stop you from facing a challenge. When we help students understand that everyone struggles with anxiety at times – even teachers – we show them that anxiety is not something to be afraid of or something that will get in their way of success.
2. When students are anxious, instead of reacting with a knee-jerk to help settle them down, encourage them to sit with their distress. Help them to accept – and not fight – their anxiety. It might help to visualize their anxiety washing over them like a wave – it will ebb, it will flow, and it will eventually resolve. Let them know it’s okay to not be okay, and that if they struggle it does not mean that they will suffer forever or not succeed. Convey that navigating emotional struggles can strengthen them and make them more resilient.
3. Promote self-compassion in times of distress; self-judgment and self-criticism tend to worsen the anxiety spiral. Ask students what they might need to tolerate uncertainty, rather than trying to fight it. Allowing students to express their needs also teaches them the valuable lesson of advocating for themselves when they are experiencing distress.
4. Encourage your students to talk openly about their anxieties with their support system. If they were having trouble in another area of life (e.g., facing a physical, academic, or financial challenge) we would encourage them to reach out, and emotional concerns should be no different. Talking about anxiety with friends, family, and others (e.g., a therapist) can help students face their difficult feelings within the context of their support systems, as opposed to avoiding dealing with the feelings altogether.
5. Tell your students about great people who have struggled with their emotions along the way. Showcase the importance of resilience in achieving big goals and overcoming challenges. Highlight the inherent difficulties people face in the processes of striving for success, not just the achievement of great results.

In sum, educators today should help students to thrive with their anxiety instead of helping them to overcome or “get rid” of it. Anxiety is a natural human emotion and it presents an opportunity for us to develop greater resilience. Let’s teach students that anxiety is an expected (albeit unpleasant) part of life, one that we can harness to learn about ourselves, connect with others, and face life’s challenges with more fortitude and strength.

David H. Rosmarin, PhD, is the author of Thriving with Anxiety: 9 Tools to Make Your Anxiety Work for You (HarperCollins). He is an associate professor at Harvard Medical School, a program director at McLean Hospital, and founder of Center for Anxiety, which provides services to over 1,000 patients/year in multiple states. Dr. Rosmarin is an international expert on spirituality and mental health, whose work has been featured in Scientific American, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Good Morning America. He can be reached via his website www.dhrosmarin.com.

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