incredible-marketing Arrow

How Do I Support My Student With Anxiety?

High school and college finals are quickly coming which means our country will be buzzing with millions of students who are trying their best to pass their exams in addition to managing their stress. Stress is on the rise for teenagers and young adults with reports of stress, distress, depression, and anxiety consistently on the rise. More than academic pressure is on the rise- young adults are feeling economic pressure, political pressure, and other external factors which make the everyday difficulty of changing hormones and trying to figure out who oneself is ever the more difficult. When finals roll around, the need to succeed, pass, and survive become even greater than they have been all semester or quarter long.

Students need extra support this time of year as their nerves run high, their schedules pile up, and their demands increase beyond what they feel they are capable of handling. If a student in our life has done the hard work of going through treatment for trauma, addiction, or other mental health students, they need our support in all the right ways, as much as possible.

Get More Than “I’m So Stressed”

Stress has become a default term meant to encompass every single internal and external factor that we do not feel that we can handle. Rather than dive into the details of what we are experiencing inside and outside of ourselves, we just reduce our experience to stress. We can’t cope, can’t function, can’t handle ourselves or our lives and we are just “so stressed”. Our body feels like it can’t keep up, our mind feels like it can’t keep up- and yet, we do little to remedy the situation. Something about our modern culture has created a reward system for being overly busy, having too many responsibilities, and thusly, being “so stressed”.

Ask the young adult in your life to give you more detail about how they are feeling, more than what they are thinking or stressing over. For students, a great portion of their stress comes from fear- fear of failing, fear of not succeeding, fear of not being able to get everything done. For each student, the roots of their fear of stress are different and can lend helpful insight into what is going on for them internally.

We’ll discuss more tips for supporting a student with anxiety in our next article.

At The Guest House Ocala, we offer residential treatment programs specialized for the care of traumas, addictions, and related mental health issues. Call us today for information on our trauma treatment programs and our concierge style customization for every guest: 1-855-483-7800