School Anxiety Strategies

School Anxiety Strategies

What to do when a student comes to your office and displays or describes physical behaviors of anxiety? Listed below is a mindfulness exercise where a student should describe 5 things about an item to help with anxiety.

Mindfulness Exercise – Notice 5 things

◦       Observe 5 things you can SEE and silently describe them to yourself in great detail.

◦       Observe 5 things you can HEAR and silently describe them to yourself in great detail.

◦       Observe 5 things you can FEEL and silently describe them to yourself in great detail.

◦       **Describe as if you were telling a person who has never seen, heard, or touched the objects before.

Next, is an anxiety kit that can be created for individuals or a group to utilize for anxiety activities for when a student is currently feeling physically anxious and displays this behavior- the activity listed above can be incorporated into the crisis kit (ex. Have a student smell the lotion and describe the scent, touch, how it looks, etc.)

Crisis Kit of Objects

◦       Scented Lotion

◦       Gum/mints/candy

◦       Fidget toy (stone, toy, cloth)

◦       Deck of cards

◦       Silly putty/play-doh

◦       Pen/paper/journal

◦       Colored pencils

◦       Activity workbook

◦       Crosswords, word searched, puzzles, hidden pictures

Anxiety Ladder – can be offered as an anxiety tool for the student to anxiety how they are feeling, at what level, and what skills they believe can help them at their certain level:

◦       Students identify different levels of their anxiety by creating an anxiety ladder.

◦       The ladder is a scale of physical sensation/urges/impulses/thoughts that students report that they experience when they have anxiety. (ex. Crying, dizziness, numbness, detached from self, tapping foot/shaking leg, fidgeting, nausea, racing thoughts, sleep problems, self-harm urges, verbal aggressive urges, impulsive behavior urges, isolation, nap/sleep, opting out).

◦       The scale is from 1 to 10 with 10 being the worst amount of anxiety that students have ever experienced.

◦       Students identify coping strategies that they feel best work for them when experiencing identified physical sensations.

This item of information can be connected to home-school-community linkages for the student and helping with anxiety.