How Can I Help My Child with Anxiety? Part 2: DESTY Mindfulness
This is the second in a our DESTY Series where I share practical tips on how to help a child with anxiety. As difficult as it can be to see a child struggling with anxiety there are things we can do to help. Mindfulness is a simple way to help you child deal with their worries.
Part 2 – Help your Child Deal with their Worries using Mindfulness
We all know that one of the key hallmarks of anxiety is worrying about something in the future or about something that may not even happen. More than likely it’s usually something that has an uncertain outcome. Worrying and anxiety are feelings that are a natural part of life and we all experience them.
For example, when I’m recording my blog posts or video lessons I always have a sense of anxiety because I don’t know how they’ll turn out or how they’ll be received. To make sure my mind does not get in the way I have to ground myself so that I can contain my thoughts and feelings and get on with what I want to do.
What to do:
One very practical and simple tool that we can all use, including children, to manage our worries and anxiety is the practice of Mindfulness. Mindfulness is simply paying attention to the present moment. It works because paying attention to the here and now means that we’re not getting pulled into future events or things that are out of our control.
To help you to manage your own anxiety I’ve recorded a very simple but powerful Mindfulness Senses Exercise MP3 that you can download by clicking on the link below. One of the most useful tools we have to ground ourselves and keep us in the here and now is our senses. This lovely 3-minute audio guide helps you to connect with your senses and come back into the moment.
We’ve also put together a beautifully animated version of this Mindfulness Senses Exercise esspecially for kids called “DESTY Mindfulness”, with our wonderful character Desty as the child’s guide.
Both of these tools are really useful, simple and effective for grounding ourselves and our children; to keep thoughts in the here and now and connected to what we can control rather than letting our mind run riot over things that are outside of our control or things that are in the future and may never happen. I hope you find them useful.
