Educators​

Schools/educators, and especially teachers always want to help their students. Unintentionally actions in the classroom and school can help promote anxiety. We will start the things we do wrong, as Dr. Cypers basketball coach would say, “You first have to know what you are doing wrong to start doing it right.”

Common Errors:

Accommodation: Requesting accommodations for anxiety as a long term solution for anxiety issues. Remember, accommodation in the long run leads to more anxiety.


Pretending: Pretending that the anxiety will go away without any help or intervention


Allowing Avoidance Behavior: When we allow avoidance behavior to happen around anxiety, we are going to continue to support anxiety seeking avoidance in the future


Emotional Reactivity: Getting overly reactive to situations can easily prime an anxious person’s brain


Anxiety priming: Anxiety priming is when you only focus on the potential anxiety outcomes of situations and have your student focus on that. For example, a high school student informs you they are going to their first party. What do you share? Do you only share all the dangers that can happen and why to avoid, or do you also share the positive outcomes that can happen at the party as well. Anxiety priming occurs when you only focus and continue to focus on all anxiety-based outcomes.


Assurance: Providing excessive assurance stokes the anxiety fire and likely leads to an anxious student feeling like they need assurance to be alright. This leads to more assurance seeking.


Snow Plow: Removing all difficult obstacles from a person’s path so they don’t have to feel anxious. The problem is that this teaches students they are not capable to handle anxious events.


Post analysis criticizing:This occurs where you share different information at different points. For example, sharing to the host of the party that this was amazing and then on the car ride home sharing your “true” thoughts that the party sucked. This teaches anxious people to not trust what is being said which heightens anxiety.


Now let’s focus on how to do it right.

Approach Anxiety Like Learning a Skill

Approach anxiety work like learning a skill such as swimming, biking, or skiing. First, before you begin, you might teach some basics. Then, once you have learned the basics, you use these skills over and over and increase the skill difficulty until you gain mastery.

Let’s take swimming for example: before you start swimming you might teach your student how to use their body in the pool, breathe and hold their breath when underwater. Then, you would bring them into the pool most likely the shallow end and have them practice in the shallow end until you see they got it. Once they have, you move to the next level, maybe the middle end or you add a new stroke in the shallow end until they got it.

Anxiety work parallels this process. First, we will teach students the F.A.C.E. skills which are the skill we want them to know, then we will help you and them develop anxiety gameplans to master their skill in this area so they are no longer anxious. Or, another way of thinking about it is your student may just become comfortable being uncomfortable. Either way, their anxiety will go down, their confidence will go up and they will have more success in the classroom.

Teaching Kids to Understand Their Anxiety

Teach students a way to understand their anxiety and brain at the right developmental level. Anxiety force’s belief is that you need to understand to help bring motivation for change. We will teach your students to see the brain as a band, with anxiety being the drummer, sometimes getting so loud it drowns out the rest of the music. We need to learn how to keep that drummer playing in rhythm with the band.

Building Incentives to Make It Fun

Learning the skills to counter your anxiety and then doing what makes you anxious is really hard for anyone, especially students. So the last key part of this program is learning how to build in incentives and make it fun for your students to engage in skill acquisition and mastery.

Get Started

  • Watch the Educator video and learn what you need to know and the F.A.C.E. approach as it relates to anxiety
  • Get access to materials you can do with your students to reinforce the skills that have learned at home
  • Work in partnership with your school’s mental health team to insure your student goes through the FACE program or FACE group at school. Insure your school has knows and has created gameplans for your students success in overcoming the obstacles that anxiety may present in the classroom.
  • Your team will be trained in the model and they can help you devise gameplans in the classroom to help minimize anxiety’s impact in the classroom.