Worry Monster Part 1: Understanding Your Child’s Fears and Anxieties

Is your child’s anxiety keeping them up at night, away from school, or by your side constantly? Are they asking the same question repeatedly even after lengthy conversations about how everything will be OK? If so I am guessing you are becoming exhausted, frustrated, and wondering what in the world will actually help your child.

In this post, I am going to cover what is happening in your child’s brain in these moments where they can’t let their fear go and no amount of reassurance soothes them. 

I often explain this to kids with a metaphor of a worry monster that is feeding their brain worry thoughts and tricking their body’s alarm to turn on. To adults, I explain that we all have intrusive thoughts and/or worry thoughts. (Intrusive thoughts are the random thoughts we are uncomfortable with, too nervous to tell anyone else about and try to shove to the back of our minds. Worry thoughts are the thoughts about everyday problems.) Some of us have extra sensitive alarm systems that turn on in response to these thoughts and signal to our bodies that we are in danger. This is our fight or flight system being activated.

To better understand those moments when your child is inconsolable it is important to note that the alarm system that is turning on, or the fight or flight system, is the exact same system that turns on to protect us from a charging bear or run from a burning house. Understandably this system is strong and immediately grabs our attention so it can keep us alive. It does its job really well and in these cases is doing too well.

Thankfully, even though the continual reassurance and consoling may not be as effective as you would like, there are many effective ways of supporting your child so that they can stand up to their worry monster and teach their body’s alarm that it can relax.

That’s a lot to cover in one blog post so I will follow up with several other educational posts about the tools I use with my clients dealing with what is described above. If you, your child, or anyone else you know is struggling with this over-reactive alarm system, reach out to a trained mental health professional and get individualized support to fight this worry monster.