Use Analogies To Explain Anxiety To Children And People Who Don’t Understand It (Yet!)

Anxiety is not a ghost term anymore! People are coming forward to take counseling on the same from the professional. It’s just a normal emotion people go through or feel when tense or in overwhelming situations. Though everyone feels anxious sometimes, the real issue arises when one feels a higher level of anxiety than usual as it is often considered a medical disorder and called an anxiety disorder.

Anxiety disorders alter one’s behavior and emotions and cause physical symptoms like anxiety attacks that affect their daily life. Unfortunately, not everyone understands anxiety, what it feels like and what it involves for those who suffer from frequently anxiety attacks. In fact, not understanding how important it is to share how they feel, children feel ashamed and started concealing their emotions, which as a result, makes their condition even worse. That said to strengthen kids’ future and make them mentally strong, the need to discuss the term ANXIETY is essentially required. Through this blog, we’ll highlight how you can use an analogy to explain anxiety to children and people, who aren’t familiar with this disorder.

How to Explain Anxiety Properly

There isn’t any definite way to explain anxiety, though it majorly depends on how everyone sees the world and accepts challenges.

With children, infographics and illustrations can be used. Thankfully, there are now children’s books talking about mental health to educate little ones. Those books encourage the kids to focus not on just physical health but mental well-being too.

You can start explaining to them with the help of a fun and understandable analogy, using your kid’s favorite topic, story, or animal. Make sure to answer all their questions (without making fun of them!). This can help them further understand what anxiety is and whether or not, they feel anxious about something.

While discussing anxiety with your little ones, make sure to encourage them to open up about their fears or anything that makes them worry. Ask them to express their feelings better, because the more they will express, the faster they will recover.

When explaining it to an adult, try analogy using something they are scared of. Let’s say, heights, for instance. Ask them to stand at the height of the tower. Many people won’t mind standing it as it is physically possible but many won’t. Why? The answer is pretty psychological, especially for those who are scared of heights.

Even the thought of standing at the top would make them feel shudder and anxious as if they were actually in the situation. The thought only would make them go through many symptoms of anxiety- from nausea to shortness of breath, even feelings of dread and wanting to escape.

When you explain the height analogy to an adult and asked them to express their emotions in the same, this makes them more aware of the symptoms. They would feel the same how they would feel when they get anxious.

The worse is, sometimes the symptoms are even without any trigger at all.

What Else Can Be Done to Make Them Understand Anxiety

On behalf of them, you can research and link out reputable and understandable websites regarding mental health and anxiety disorder to make them realize what the disorder entails.

Or, the best you can do is to share your personal experiences with them and educate them how they helped you when shared or discussed with friends or family.

People are suffering due to COVID-19 already and anxiety just made the whole situation even worse. Therefore, now is the time to push your people, be it a kid or an adult, to come forward and share. Because nothing good will happen to keep the thoughts inside.

Thus, to help people out, keep this analogy strategy in mind.

Besides, if you are looking for professional counseling, you can reach Labor Behavioral at www.lahorbehavioral.com for professional counseling.