What if there are monsters in my room? What if it storms and I get struck by lightning?  What if a dog runs up to me in the park?  

To a child’s emotion brain these thoughts may as well be smoke to a smoke alarm.  Their brain will metaphorically go Beep! Beep!  Beep! Doing its job as protector at the slightest sense of danger. Cue anxiety.

But, think about it. How often does a home’s smoke alarm go off because the toast is burning and not because of a real fire?  Quite often!  The same applies to our brain’s smoke alarm. The emotion brain can’t tell the difference between a REAL threat and THOUGHTS of threat so it will want to protect the body at the mere thought of monsters, storms and dogs.

The emotion brain protects the body by turning on its in-built protection system, and this is what we feel when anxious.  Our body protects us by working to fight or flee the ‘perceived’ threat, or to shut down.  This explains why anxiety is a very physical experience – our body is getting ready to be physical in some way.

The golden tools to managing children’s anxiety are to understand that:

• The emotion brain’s job is to protect

• It has no ability to know the difference between real and thoughts, and

• The physical feelings of anxiety are our body protecting us

This understanding guides the approach to take as well as the strategies to use.  

COPING WITH CHILDREN’S ANXIETY USING THE EMOTION BRAIN

The best approach to manage children’s anxiety is do anything that makes the emotion brain feel safe, so it has no need to switch on the protection system.  That can come in the form of words, smells, images, memories, sounds, or textures - anything that brings a safe and comfortable feeling.

Strategies can include deep breathing and changing or disengaging from the thought stories being sent to the emotion brain (that is the ‘smoke’). Deep breathing is a strategy that gets a lot of airplay and children can be quick to say breathing doesn’t work.  For deep breathing to ‘work’ it comes down to, again, understanding physiology.  

When we are in protection mode our breath is short and shallow. To come back to the calm zone, we need to breathe in a way that will send the message to the emotion brain that we are safe.  That is slow and deep as we breathe slowly and deeply when we are relaxed. Breathing this way can trick our relaxation system to switch on.  From the brain’s point of view if you are breathing like this you must be feeling fine. 

Changing or disengaging from the thought (threat) story that the emotion brain is responding to makes sense when you liken thoughts to smoke going to a smoke alarm.  If we send smoke to a smoke alarm, the smoke alarm will always do its job.  It is the same with our brain’s smoke alarm (emotion brain).  If worry chatter is being sent to it, it will always do its job by switching on our protection system, and thus starting the cascade of anxiety feelings.