Emotions Aboard the Covid Ark

So here we are in the middle of a long journey.  It might feel a bit like being on Noah’s ark with not enough places to really get away from one another and things are starting to stink!  As we hit this point in the journey, emotions may be running high.  Many of those emotions, though, aren’t connected to being in close quarters.  The close quarters just make the emotions more amplified and often messy because when they explode, they hit more people.

So why are emotions running rampant through the ark?  There are two very likely struggles your teen might be experiencing during this time which could cause some rather challenging behaviors and secondary emotions.  So the goal here is to identify them and offertips for helping your teen through them.  

One of the key struggles that teens might be experiencing at this time is anxiety.  For many reasons this makes sense in our times of uncertainty.  There is uncertainty about the virus itself, the shaking economy, loved-ones, new ways of doing school, when it will all end so they can return to normal time with their friends.  Many of the other emotions and challenging behaviors of your teen are a by-product of anxiety.

First, it’s important to know that a little stress can be healthy as it motivates, helps one solve problems and get things done.  Even a little anxiety can be good for the same reason - it’s our body reacting to our brain’s signal that there might be danger.  A little stress and anxiety over a test, for example, can motivate a student to study as they have a heightened awareness of the importance of it.  To that degree, we should teach our teens that it’s okay to feel some anxiety, that it is normal, and that they don’t have to fear it.  

However, it is when anxiety rules one’s thoughts that it becomes a problem.  It then starts to produce physical symptoms and emotional responses.  Anxiety often produces - depending on the individual - a fight, flight, or freeze response.  Some of the behaviors or emotional responses you see might not look like anxiety on the surface but are actually the product of it

Your teen’s (and perhaps your own) anxiety may look like:

Anger:  When anxiety triggers a fight response, your teen may react with anger, but not understand or be able to articulate why they are angry.

Trouble Sleeping:  This is a classic symptom of anxiety.  When the body is still and distractions are removed, the brain stays busy and the anxious thoughts begin their own party.

Defiance:  This isn’t uncommon during times when a teen feels a lack of control over their circumstances.  It’s a fight response as they attempt to ‘take control’ back.

Exploding:  Also known as chandeliering, this happens when your usually calm teen flies off the handle because instead of talking about it, they’ve let all of the anxiety build up until it all releases at once, sending them straight through the chandelier.

Lack of Focus:  When anxious thoughts take over, it becomes difficult to focus or pay attention to what is happening around them as they are lost in their own thoughts. Negative thoughts cause changes in the brain that make focus and problem-solving difficult.

Avoidance:  This is a flight or freeze response.  If your teen is anxious about a particular thing, they often attempt to avoid it, which interestingly can cause them to have to experience more of what they are avoiding. A common example is avoidance of the work in a class students are anxious about.

Overplanning:  This is a type of fight response.  You might be seeing your teen begin to take on almost OCD behaviors - perhaps in their hyper-organization of their room, or their determination to have perfect grades or even continually cleaning your home as they attempt to gain control over as many parts of their world as possible.

Negativity: Teens lean more towards negativity by nature, hence the term ‘teenage angst.'  One experiencing anxiety has an increased load of negative thoughts.

The second likely struggle is that they are grieving.  It might seem odd that they would grieve if they haven’t lost someone.  However, they are grieving multiple losses.  They’ve lost their routine, potentially their favorite sports season, and other school activities they were looking forward to. For many, much of what fills their cup on a daily basis is missing right now.  Seniors have lost a lot.  Their last quarter of high school, filled with so many special and fun events for the seniors, is lost.  Students are grieving the loss of time with their friends, or favorite teachers that might be leaving and time with them.  

With their grieving comes moving through the stages of grief. The stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.  You likely can identify which stages your teen - and even you - have moved through or are currently in. The stages aren’t always linear and may not happen in a particular order.  Or one might bounce around from one to another, even potentially revisiting a stage they’ve already experienced.  

First, take a deep breath.  It is hard to not respond emotionally sometimes - especially to bad behaviors.  But before you react, just breath in and out and remind yourself that there might be underlying things going on. 

The best way to help students through their anxiety or grief is to help them acknowledge the feelings and allow them to feel them.  So many times our young people (and adults) tell themselves “I shouldn’t feel this way” when it comes to negative emotions.  They need to give themselves permission (and you can help with this), to acknowledge the feeling and actually feel it for a while.  Fighting the feeling doesn’t eliminate it - and it doesn’t help them move through it.  Rather it just allows them to build to points where they become unmanageable. 

Your teen may need help exploring how they are feeling.  If you see a behavior, for example, connected to anxiety, acknowledge the behavior and explore it with them.  You can call them out on it, but do so with a little grace and see if you can help them explore what is going on.  That might look something like, “You seem really angry which is now becoming a problem.  What’s going on that’s making you angry?”  This can be a way to initiate a conversation about what they are feeling.  They might not know themselves, but together you can figure it out.

Help them shift their focus - for some, you’ll be working towards pulling them out of their head and back onto the present.  You may have heard about practicing ‘mindfulness’ which is  focusing on what is going on around you.  Sometimes it is literally focusing on what you can hear right now, what do you smell right now, what do you see, etc.  Focus on what is happening in the present moment.  Right now they are safe, nothing that they are worrying about has happened.  They have everything they need, they are (prayerfully) not sick, they can still connect to friends.

In line with shifting focus is balancing thoughts.  If your teen is struggling right now it's very possible that their brain has been overtaken with primarily negative thoughts.  Brain science tells us that the more thinking is negative, the more synapses and neurons your brain will create that are supporting your negative thought process. This actually slows down the brain's ability to function and affects cognition.  By helping your teen shift their thoughts, you are actually helping rewire the brain. Cortisol (stress-created chemical) is replaced with serotonin which helps one feel happier, calmer, less anxious and more emotionally stable. Finding things that bring joy, hope, excitement, laughter, and even fond memories can get the brain back in balance.  A great tool that can also help is an app like ‘Calm’ that is especially helpful if the thoughts race when attempting to sleep.  There are different components that can give their minds a pleasant place to focus away from their anxious thoughts so their brains slow down and rest.

Lastly, help them take control of the controllable.  It wouldn’t hurt to make a list of things they can control.  Help them set small, daily goals.  Help them set a routine - that’s a significant thing they can control.  And then do your best to respect that routine because with it, they have some normalcy in their world and some idea of what to expect day-to-day in a time that is otherwise unpredictable.  And then help them let go of the uncontrollable.  Again, it wouldn’t hurt to make a list of things they cannot control and then talk about ways they can let those things go.  They may need to keep the list and remind themselves that they’ve let those things go because they can’t control them.  Or they could write the list and then throw them away or give them away to you as a physical reminder that they are letting them go.

As parents, watching your children suffer or struggle is a hard thing.  But one of the positive by-products that will come out of this is greater resilience and grit.  It is in the struggle that strength is built.  Walking through this prepares and equips your teen to face other hard things with the knowledge that they can press through with positive coping skills that this time has developed in them.  That is a really, really good thing!