Mayuri Breen Gonzalez – Anxiety in Children & Adolescents

Do you work with children whose anxiety is overwhelming them, who shy away from participating in new activities or taking on challenges because they are afraid to fail….or you worry they’ll choose harmful coping mechanisms as they struggle with the stress of their lives?

When children can’t cope, challenges become stressors, and anxiety replaces anticipation. Our kids can’t enjoy childhood to the fullest, their learning suffers, and their long-term resilience is compromised.

Kids often get a message that their anxiety is something to get rid of or push away, but like all emotions our anxiety has a job to do.

In this recording, Mayuri Gonzalez, kids’ yoga and mindfulness expert, shows you how to teach our kids to better understand their own experience, and find effective ways to meet their needs and engage in their lives from a place of personal power and agency.

Your immediate takeaways will help your clients and students (Kids):

• Prepare for anxiety producing situations
• Navigate stress
• Reduce overwhelm and reactivity
• Participate fully in school and home
• Harness their capacity for self-compassion

You’ll walk away with a new framework for relating to anxiety, along with concrete practices to help your clients and students learn to access their inner resources, calm their anxiety, transform their relationship to stress, and thrive even when life is challenging.

1. Consider the impact of family, school, media and global events on children as it relates to anxiety and treatment options.
2. Identify various forms of anxiety, and learn to use anxiety as an information gathering tool.
3. Build client capacity to identify rising anxiety before it becomes overwhelming or debilitating.
4. Learn to manage escalating emotions and intrusive thoughts with embodied practices.
5. Develop differentiated strategies to address anxiety rooted in building self-awareness, capacity and confidence.
6. Enhance resilience through personal and partner-based practices.

What is Causing Rising Childhood Anxiety?

• The Challenges of 21st Century Living for Kids
  • Disconnection
    • Adult technology use
    • Social media
    • Caregiver stress and distraction
  • Over-stimulation
    • Technology
    • Academic pressure
    • Changing expectations
    • Over scheduling
    • World events

Assessing for Anxiety – How Do Kids Cope?

• Common Reactions to Anxiety
  • Withdrawal
  • Procrastination
  • Perfectionism
  • Seeking reassurance and affirmation
  • Risk-taking and substance abuse
  • Relationship challenges
• Tools and resources children already have
• Implications for mental health and long term individual and community outcomes

Why Do We Have Anxiety and What is it Trying to Tell Us?

• Types of anxiety
• Anxiety and the brain-nervous system-body relationship
• Anxiety as necessary and functional – we all have it!
  • Gives us information
  • Can help us prepare for challenges
• What happens when anxiety becomes mal-adaptive?
  • Relationship between mindset and biology of the nervous system
  • Reduced decision making capacity
  • Increasing reactivity
  • Impact of frequent overwhelm
• Trauma and anxiety
• Relationship and the role of the adults in childhood anxiety

Yoga, Mindfulness and Resilience

• Embodied mindfulness practices build the capacity to navigate stress
• Reading the messages of the body
  • Recognizing the early warning signs of anxiety
  • Checking in with my body
• Engaging and strengthening our inner resources
  • Body
  • Breath
  • Mindset

Activities for Managing Escalating Emotions and Finding Equilibrium

• Grounding
  • Feeling my feet
  • Somatic holds
• Orienting
  • Layers of sound
  • Five senses
  • Tapping
• Managing intrusive thoughts and rumination
  • Single pointed focus
  • Naming my thoughts

What to Do When Anxiety Shows up: Response Strategy Skills

• Ask for help
  • Partner chair pose
• Take a break
  • Calming breath
  • Legs up the wall
• Keep trying
  • Managing frustration and other strong emotions
  • Standing balance
  • Chair pose

Practices for Building Agency and Personal Power to Enhance Resilience

• Change your mindset, change your nervous system
  • The warriors
  • Finger affirmations
  • Mountain top visualization
• Harness the power of helping others
  • Partner warrior three
  • Leading a practice

Activities to Fight Anxiety with Connection and Attunement

• Imaginary ball pass
• Rainstorm
• Crazy 8s
• Kind wishes

More courses from the same author: Mayuri Breen Gonzalez