Anxiety Relief Book for Kids: Activities to Understand and Overcome Worry, Fear, and Stress

CHAPTER 1

WHAT ARE MY WORRIES?

Do you ever wonder if worries are normal? Or what worries even are? The first step in learning how to handle worries is to understand them. Understanding what worries are, and knowing what your worries are, will help you recognize worry when it’s happening. When you can recognize worry, you’ll be able to know when it’s time to use the skills you learn later in this book.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about different kinds of worries, and you’ll get to do some activities to help you get to know your own worries better.

WHAT ARE WORRIES?

If you’re reading this book, you might be a kid who worries a lot. Maybe you’ve even been told, You worry too much! But what exactly are worries? A worry is a type of thought. Worry thoughts are usually about something bad happening that hasn’t happened yet, and might not ever happen, but that you think could happen. Maybe you even think it WILL happen. A lot of times, worry thoughts start with What if . . . ?

What if I get sick?

What if I fail that test?

What if people laugh at me?

A lot of kids worry about things like getting hurt, making mistakes, or people getting mad at them. Worries can be about any bad thing you think could happen. These types of thoughts make people feel anxious, nervous, or scared.

Even though worries often start with what if, the question isn’t what kids are really worried about. It’s the answer to the what if? question that makes them feel anxious. And our imaginations sure can come up with all kinds of scary answers that can seem very convincing. Even though they really come from your brain, it can feel like worries have a mind of their own.

It can actually help to think of worries as coming from outside of you. Some people like to compare worries to a bug, buzzing around their heads like a pest that just won’t go away. Some people think about worries like they’re a scary noise coming from behind a closed door—they may feel afraid of what’s on the other side, but when they are brave enough to open the door, they see it was just a trick and there was nothing to be afraid of after all. As you work through this book, you’ll see that most of the time, things don’t turn out nearly as bad as worries tell you they will.

Here’s another way to think about worries. Have you ever known someone who exaggerated things a lot? Maybe they told you something easy to believe, like they had a birthday party, but then added details that made it hard to believe, like they had a thousand guests and a hundred-foot-tall cake that everyone climbed before taking rides on a real-life unicorn.

A friend like this might try really hard to convince you that their stories are true, and even get mad at you for not believing them. They might even try to get you to make decisions based on their false information.

If this friend seemed to care about you, and was even helpful at times, you might want to keep them around. But would you trust everything they told you, knowing they exaggerated so much? Do you think you would believe everything this friend said?

Probably not. You’d probably want to do some investigating yourself before deciding which things to believe (like they had a party with guests and cake and had fun) and which things to ignore (that there were a thousand guests, a cake so big people could climb it, and a mythical creature at the party).

Worry is a lot like this friend. Sometimes it seems to want what’s best for you and may even give you helpful or important information, but it exaggerates A LOT. You might even want to give your worry friend a name, like Worrying Wally, or Exaggerating Edna.

Sometimes kids know what their worry thoughts are, and sometimes their worry is more like a feeling, like being scared or nervous or just really not wanting to do something. If you’re one of those kids who feels scared a lot but you don’t know why, it’s okay. The exercises in this book can help you figure out what’s really bothering you. It might be hard to think about sometimes, but I know you can do