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One of my specialities is working with children, teens, and adults with anxiety. In this blog post I would like to share one of my favorite resources for helping kids with anxiety. A great book that you can use with your child at home is What to Do When You Worry Too Much: A Kid's Guide to Overcoming Anxiety (What to Do Guides for Kids). This book is recommended for children ages 8 to 12 years old. I often recommend to parents that they get this workbook as a supplement to their child’s therapy and work on it with their child at home in between sessions. The same author, Dr. Dawn Huebner, recently published another anxiety workbook geared towards older children called Outsmarting Worry: An Older Kid's Guide to Managing Anxiety. This is another great workbook to supplement therapy and may be more applicable if your child is older or at a higher reading level. What to Do When You Worry Too Much: A Kid's Guide to Overcoming Anxiety (What to Do Guides for Kids) can help teach your child skills to manage and deal with their anxiety. It is an interactive workbook that allows your child to write, draw, and color throughout the book. It uses relatable metaphors and stories that the kids in my office have found helpful for understanding and dealing with their anxiety. The skills in this book are based on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) which is an evidenced-based treatment. This means that it has a significant amount of research supporting its effectiveness for helping treat anxiety. To learn more about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) for children, check out this article by the Child Mind Institute or this handout from the University of Washington Harborview Medical Center. I hope this was helpful, thanks for reading! In my previous blog post I started a discussion of sleep tips. Here are 6 more tips on improving your sleep quality:
1. Don’t stay in your bed for more than 30 minutes if you can’t sleep. The brain often makes associations between things and you don’t want your brain to start associating your bed with not sleeping. This is one of the reasons why it’s also important not to do other activities in your bed such as work or homework. If you lay in your bed for hours trying to go to sleep and thinking about how you can’t sleep you might start to feel stressed and anxious. Your brain might start associating your bed with stress and not sleeping. This can make the insomnia worse. Instead of laying there, I recommend that you get out of your bed if you still can’t fall asleep after 30 minutes. Try getting out of your bed and doing a light activity, such as reading, sitting or laying on the couch, or light housework such as putting clothes away. You could also try listening to a relaxation or meditation recording such as Insight Timer. When you start to feel sleepy again, try to lay down to go back to sleep. The goal is to teach the brain that bed=sleep. 2. Keep your room dark, minimize outside light coming in, and turn off TV and computer screens. 3. Keep your clock and phone screens turned down or faced away from you. Looking at a clock or phone multiple times a night can cause more stress and anxiety, particularly if you aren’t sleeping. Set an alarm before you go to sleep so you don’t have to worry about checking the time. 4. Keep your room at a cooler temperature for optimal sleep. 5. Minimize alcohol and caffeine use. Limit caffeine to the morning and stop caffeine intake during the afternoon. Consuming caffeine in the late afternoon can keep you up at night and caffeine can stay in your system for up to 12 hours. Limit the amount of alcohol you drink in the evening. Too much can interfere with the quality of your sleep and disrupt your sleep cycle. 6. Use a sleep diary to track sleeping habits and routines before bed. Thanks for reading! I hope this helps! -Rondale |
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November 2023
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