Students with Anxiety

Students with Anxiety 

As counselors, everyday is different and every student is different-including their range of struggles and difficulties. We do come into contact with those students who struggle with anxiety and stress. 

I recently began using a great resource called "What to Do When You Worry Too Much" by Dawn Huebner, Ph.D. 

Available on Amazon

The book is 80 pages long and includes various stories students can relate to, different useful strategies for dealing with anxiety, and worksheets that I have found to be very helpful so far. 

I like this book because, as you can see on the cover, it does a great job of relating stress to growing tomatoes. (Sounds odd at first, I know). However, this book describes growing a tomato plant by watering it and making sure it gets plenty of sunlight. Basically showing that if you give attention to your plant, it will grow big and strong. 

It uses the same analogy for worries and anxiety. If you keep giving so much attention to your worries like you do your tomato plant, your worries will grow big and strong. 

Not only did I like the analogy, I also love the activity worksheets included. What I have been doing is making a packet of different worksheets to complete as we go along with the book. These worksheets include: 

• Draw something you worry about
• Circle the words that describe how you feel when you are worried
• Put an X on the parts of your body that hurt when you feel worried
• Write down one of your worries
• What can you say or do to help yourself feel less worried?

It also gives great strategies like creating a worry box and a time in the day to discuss their worries. I have the student close their eyes and imagine the strongest box they can think of. I then discuss that this box has one purpose-to carry their worries until worry time. Worry Time is a strategy from the book. Students are allowed 15 minutes a day to discuss their worries. If it is not Worry Time, they lock their worries in the box until it is time to discuss.

So far this book has been super helpful for me when working with students who struggle with anxiety. Again, I find the analogies used in the book easy for students to relate to and understandable for the students. I love the different strategies and the worksheets included to go along with the book. Like I mentioned earlier, every student is different and that's why I like this book. It doesn't give a "one size fits all" strategy list and allows the students (and me) to do the whole trial and error process to see which strategy will work best. 

I look forward to continuing my work with this book and aiding my students who struggle with worrying and anxiety.

Here are some examples of the worksheets in "What to Do When You Worry Too Much"