My child’s anxious brain: can I rewire it?

There’s been an exponential increase in internet searches on the many variations of “how can I rewire my child’s anxious brain?” recently.

The good news is that parents obviously really care about their child’s anxiety and want to sort it out. 

The extra bit of good news is: you can definitely do it. Mostly yourself, and sometimes with the help of a good children’s counsellor.

The bad news is, it’s not a good sign that modern life and a recent pandemic are combining to make this the worse time ever for child anxiety.

So let’s take a deep dive into what’s going on and what needs to be done to help your child's anxious brain.

Anxiety can be described as:

• a natural and necessary function
• a vicious circle
• a protective mechanism
• a habit.

We’ll look at them in turn.

Why should you NOT rewire your child’s anxious brain? It’s a natural and necessary function!

This seems an odd place to start, but your child’s anxious brain is part of being human. It’s the part of the brain that ensures they survive by flagging up danger and helping their body take action.

This, therefore, is the type of anxiety that you need to teach your child is good anxiety. It helps them. It keeps them out of danger. And if they learn to listen wisely to feelings of anxiety when they’re about to do something risky or dodgy, they’ll be safer.

Which kind of things might cause them to “hear a warning whisper from their helpful anxious brain”? Get your child to think of a few, such as:

• going to put their finger in an electric socket to see what happens
• running across a road without look right and left first
• taking something from a shop without paying
• passing on some horrible bit of information about a friend to another child

If they understand that a reasonable amount of anxiety is normal and necessary, this will help your child feel better about themselves, and then you can start working on the over-anxious bits. We call those the "false alarms"!

Here's an A4 colouring sheet to print out with a fun rhyme about worrying being normal, but false alarms are not helpful! Your child can decorate the borders in their own fab way.

How your child’s anxious brain becomes a vicious circle of over-reacting

Vicious circle or virtuous circle? Here, we’re concerned about noting a possibly vicious one in your child. But it helps to compare them.

The virtuous one is when your child recognises they’re anxious about something and manages to deal with it. This might be by 

• realising they can’t do anything about it and so not letting it bother them any more, or 
• doing something about it because there’s something they can do, or (and this is where you come in)
• asking you to help them with the worry or to take over responsibility for it.

Have a look for the activity here.

So what’s the vicious circle? 

Well, the vicious one looks more like this. Your child

• worries about something until they’re in a tizz,
• finds they have no energy left to deal with the worry in a sensible way,
• imagines a threat or something going wrong all the time, and
• starts to believe their brain’s trick that there really is something to worry about.

You can see how this brain trick leads them further down the spiral of  powerlessness, stress and depression. 

The anxiety has taken over and you will need to help them sort things out.

Rewiring your child’s anxious brain when you see it’s become a protective mechanism

None of us likes to feel stressed and anxious, so this route is where your child – being human like the rest of us – seeks a way of protecting themselves from the feeling. Not the anxious event, note, but the feeling itself.

This means they may, instead, feel panic attacks, depressed, headaches or anything else that prevents them having to handle their anxiety. 

The thing is that, however bad that feels, your child thinks it’s preferable to feeling anxious. 

That’s why, if you think your child is protecting themselves by NOT doing something that’s worrying them, you need to step in and help them realise that anxiety is normal but that shutting their life down is spoiling their fun.

Then you can try to help them find a way through the anxiety – taking charge of their brain again. The strategies tab may help you find a great way to do this.

Breaking your child’s habit of letting their brain get anxious

When anxiety has become a habit, it becomes a familiar feeling. Not particularly welcome, but accepted as “who they are”, part of their identity almost. It kind of dictates how they behave in future.

The trick here is to help them see it’s become a habit that’s not helping them live life to the full. So they need to learn how to 

• recognise the situations that make them anxious,
• notice the bodily symptoms just as they’re starting up,
• recognise and name the feelings, both good and bad (familiarity or fear), and
• put into practice whatever plan you and they have come up with to break the habit.

How to calm your child’s anxious brain

Let’s look at a number of strategies that, between them, cover various ways of calming your child’s anxious brain.

1 Teach them to calm themselves

If your child gets stressed and anxious pretty often about something, their body is releasing cortisol – the stress hormone – to help them fight or run away (flee).

It's an ancient feature of humans.

But it's clearly not good when most things in modern life do NOT need us to run away or take up a spear. There’s no woolly mammoth approaching!

So teach your child to calm themselves as a matter of routine. No specific reason, just something you all do, maybe after breakfast before you rush into the day, or after tea before the children go to bed. Whatever’s convenient.

Here are three ways to do this, according to what your child feels comfortable with.

• the butterfly tap – stimulating both sides of the brain calms down intense anxiety. It's explained in the link.
• deep breathing or blowing out candles
• drawing patterns in a square, rectangle or circle quietly and concentratedly. (See details below.) Encourage them to keep a collection of their designs.

2 Assemble some calming music for bedtime or any other time when their brain is anxious.

What’s best for this? A playlist of quiet, gentle music that has no words and is a bit repetitive in melody and not too high in sound. 

Have a look at the guidance I give in the link and try the samples so you know the kind of music that works best. Then you can make up your own similar playlist from what you have available.

Encourage all members of the family to practise relaxing completely to this kind of music for 5-10 minutes. 

3 Use a family session to find out how each member relaxes best.

You can find details and instructions here and there's also a link over there to the pdf of the chart you need so you can print it out (one each) and record your answers, which is so much more fun.

Anxiety cuts off the thinking brain so you do need a way your child can instantly move into relaxation and away from their anxious brain. And this is a nice way to discover who prefers what method.

When you've realised how different or how similar you all are, help your child to commit to doing their own relaxation method whenever they start getting an anxious brain moment.

And one more thing...

Kate Silverton's imaginative metaphor – referring to parts of our brain as a baobab tree, a lizard, a baboon and a wise owl – is the best I’ve come across for helping us understand what’s happening with our children when they have an anxious brain moment. 

Not only when they appear naughty haha, but also when they're scared witless, panicked, anxious or in need of comfort. As in, for example, emerging to normal life after Covid. 

Let's understand and tackle our children's anxious brains before the mental health crisis gets worse. I hope you've found this page helpful. If you feel you'd like your child to work with a counsellor, do visit my help page to find out how to to find and choose a good one.

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ALWAYS:

Trust your instincts,
use your judgement, protect the spirit
of your child