Young people from the age of about 5 and up are experiencing greater and greater levels of anxiety. This is connected to a variety of factors, but in particular diminishing resilience is considered one of the biggest factors. Resilience is what means that regardless of what life throws at us, we can adjust.

Increased screen time, diminished outdoor play, greater and greater pressures on parents and teachers to be “perfect” at parenting and raising children means that young people are getting pulled in all directions.

However we’ve also learned that anxiety and stress can play critical roles in building our resilience. In order to beat anxiety, we have to work with it and accept it as a part of our humanity. At Risky Kids we’re leading the way in finding and understanding the healthiest way to achieve this, through risk!

It’s something we’ve been asked before, that making kids experience anxiety isn’t helpful or beneficial. It’s not as simple as that, because there’s all types of emotions and degrees of anxiety. Simply meeting a new person can make us anxious!

Helping young people to experience the healthy anxiety that accompanies challenge and adversity, in order to understand and master it, isn’t a straightforward process and if done incorrectly can make things worse.

The short answer is no, experiencing anxiety, even high doses, isn’t something which compromises us as a person or even has negative long term effects. Many people who go through terrible things excel in life. Our goal is to help young people to be their best, and accept and embrace every part of themselves, even the tough parts.

Anxiety isn’t just an error in our brain or processing. It’s part of a program that has very specific roles and responsibilities. Like any program though there can be bugs and errors. Anxiety has the role of telling us when there’s something that could harm us, to draw our attention to it.

That could be physical danger, like something hot or a high fall, or it could be something emotional or social like somebody yelling at us or the fear of failure. These trigger anxiety to prompt action. That action then needs to be decided by a thinking process. When these two work together, it protects us from being hurt and helps us navigate towards our goals.

Anxiety and stress will also kick into gear a whole host of chemical and physical processes. We focus more, we think quicker and we can act faster. If we can manage these reactions, then stress will actually enhance our performance, helping us achieve goals which might have otherwise been unattainable.

Like most parts of being a human, things don’t always go according to plan though! Anxiety can be too overactive, it can make us fear things which we shouldn’t or it might make us fear things too much. When fear or anxiety drives us away, it triggers “avoidance behaviour”. This is anything which tries to diminish the anxiety, often without consideration of the cost.

This means that we might avoid things that are good for us. Because we’re afraid of rejection, we might avoid trying to meet new people and make new friends. If we’re afraid of failure, we might not put all of our effort into something that we want to succeed at.

The biggest danger of this is that when anxiety starts to work in this way, it makes us comfortable. When you remove discomfort and replace it with comfort it creates a reinforcing cycle. Especially with young people, we begin to find it difficult to separate healthy avoidance, with unhealthy.

It’s achievable though! Like anything, managing our stress and anxiety is a skill and one that can be both taught and learned. By challenging ourselves we create opportunities to navigate these feelings and learn to manage them, all while achieving growth and goals.

We can learn to balance unhealthy avoidance by:

• Finding the “Grain of Truth” about why we’re feeling uncertain or anxious,
• Making decisions based on growth and opportunity, not on comfort,
• Finding ways that work for us to reduce stress such as mindfulness or breathing exercises,
• Working with people who are patient and understanding, but also who challenge us,
• Identifying and breaking patterns of avoidance, considering each situation on it’s individual merits,

These are some of the tools we can use to manage our anxiety. However one of the best ways is through experiential learning. By experiencing these emotions we can learn how they feel, normalise them and understand how to use them to help us grow.

There’s also a powerful effect that happens in our minds and our nervous systems when we experience stress and anxiety in a healthy fashion. This is known as the “toughening up” process, where our mind and body become more resilient.

Our mind will not only develop new strategies and ways of thinking to be able to manage these challenging feelings, but each time we go through a (reasonably) stressful situation our very neurobiology becomes less sensitive. It becomes less affected by the experience of stress and anxiety.

This is why avoiding stress and anxiety completely is unhealthy, especially when people are young. It’s a necessary and developmental part of growing up that we face challenges and tough feelings. This is why risk taking when we’re young is one of the cornerstones of resilience and preventing mental illness.

It’s not just about forcing kids to face anxiety though! There’s powerful techniques to help young people to experience these feelings in a positive, empowering way. One of the key components is to give it a purpose. Learning a new skill, such as mastering our bodies is a powerful way to face and understand these feelings. That skill can even be understanding our minds and anxiety better!

Risky Kids combines this in all of our programs, using accessible and global movement styles combined with dedicated Mindset training and discussions based on what is best for young people. This creates an interventionary and experiential process, where we stop disorders or unhealthy thinking or behaviour from emerging in the first place.

This is provided by a specially trained team who are given skills ranging from emotional regulation, to counselling techniques and mentoring skills (even motivational speaking!). All of this combines creates the perfect community to explore anxiety and all emotions (boredom, frustration, triumph) in a positive and empowering way.

We do have to help young people to face these feelings, regardless of what form it might take. Avoidance behaviour can pop up as quitting behaviour, “I’m bored” language or just sadness.

We can and must help young people to work through these moments, and those moments often become some of the most important to us as parents or educators as we see young people triumph and grow.