Young people carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. They feel pressured to do well in school, succeed in their social life and plan their entire futures while undergoing puberty.
It creates the perfect storm for anxiety conditions, but how do you know if your teen needs help?
These are 10 things you should look for if you think your teen has anxiety or want to ask a professional for help.
1. Constant Intense Headaches
Everyone’s experienced a stress headache before.
The mental pressure of doing well or figuring your way through a problem may result in a headache until you’re in a less stressful situation.
Teenagers with anxiety will have similar headaches, but they last much longer because their anxiety creates ongoing stressful environments.
2. Crying More Often
When someone finds themselves at risk of a real or perceived threat, the body responds by producing more cortisol.
The stress hormone helps people engage their fight or flight response, but it isn’t supposed to be a long-term experience.
Ongoing stress translates into anxiety, which triggers the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis and elicits emotional responses.
Many people with anxiety cry inexplicably to release their stress and feel better. Anxiety conditions will make this type of crying happen more often or nearly every day.
3. Changes in Eating Habits
Anxiety can also change a young person’s eating habits.
They may begin to overeat because their brain produces more dopamine when the tastebuds react positively to a meal or snack.
A teenager might also stop eating because their anxious stress hormones put them in flight mode and conserve the desire for hunger to help the person run from a perceived threat.
4. Excessive Daily Sweating
The sympathetic nervous system gains more control of the body when it’s anxious.
It will raise the person’s heart rate and body temperature, resulting in excessive sweating. Teenagers may sweat more if they have intense anxiety, but how can parents tell if that’s happening with their teen or if the sweat is related to puberty?
Young people must experience intense sweating for longer than six months for a medical professional to link it to anxiety.
Give your teen time to experience challenging and easy periods to see if the sweating peaks when they’re most stressed.
5. Continual Bouts of Anger
Puberty is infamous for instigating mood swings. Teenagers have fluctuating hormones, resulting in bursts of anger or irritability.
Those same mood swings can be a sign of anxiety as well. Experts agree that anger can be an attempt to control whatever’s causing someone’s fear, like getting defensive about a particular worry or concern.
The best thing to do is talk through the anger and find out what’s really causing your teenager’s moods.
6. Restless or Hyperactive Habits
Adrenaline is another part of feeling stressed that results in hyperactivity.
The ongoing increased stress hormone might make your teenager bounce their leg under the table or chew on their nails even when they’re otherwise at ease.
A young person might feel a constant buzzing or a desire to work on something to vent their anxious adrenaline unknowingly.
7. Fear of Making Mistakes
No one enjoys making a mistake. It’s painful and embarrassing, even if you learn something from it.
Anxious teenagers will share that same sense of dread, but the fear can paralyze them.
They might procrastinate the most simple tasks or break down into a full-on panic attack before a big exam or when they are clocking into their part-time jobs.
Anxiety makes it challenging to remember that everyone lives through and learns from their mistakes because it transforms possible problems into personally destructive and life-altering complications.
Grounding techniques or a schedule change could help teens work through this anxiety symptom.
8. Ongoing Episodes of Insomnia
People sometimes talk about experiencing the Sunday scaries.
It’s the anxious butterflies in your stomach that come around every Sunday evening because you’re stressed about returning to work.
Teenagers can feel the same way about school or their social life but then have nightly insomnia.
If your teen hasn’t slept through more than two nights in a row, talk with them about what’s running through their mind when sleep evades them.
They’ll likely discuss their ongoing stressors, which will point you toward the best solution to help them rest.
9. Obsessive Daily Routines
Striving for more control of your life results from intense anxiety. Teenagers have little control over their lives because of their age, so they might compensate with obsessive routines.
Your teen might have daily planners filled out down to the minute or put up a fight when even the smallest part of their routine has to change.
Many people experience this symptom and don’t even realize it’s because their anxiety has them on edge.
10. Avoiding Social Activities
Fearing social activities is another common teenage anxiety.
They could feel like they don’t fit in with their friend group or worry about acting at ease with other people. It may seem better to spend time alone at home or in their room.
While it’s good to experience alone time every once in a while, parents should take note of how often their teen craves isolation to pinpoint if they have chronic anxiety.
Help Your Teen With Anxiety
These are a few things you should look for if you think your teen has anxiety, but keep an eye out for anything else that might strike you as odd.
Permanent changes in your teenager’s behaviors, personality, or lifestyle could indicate that they need healthy anxiety coping mechanisms provided by a trained mental health professional.