How to Reduce Anxiety: Yours and Your Child’s
By: Gary G. Brannigan,
Disabilities: Beating The Odds.
Ph.D. and Howard Margolis, Ed.D. coauthors of Reading
Part II of this article may be found at Here
Reprinted with the express permission of the authors as originally published on Reading 2008 Blog.
NB: This article is written for the parents of children who have Anxiety and related problems. We publish it
here because we know that therapists like to give their client's caregivers as much information as possible.
Many parents of children with disabilities worry—constantly. They fear the future, they feel extremely
anxious—constantly. So do their children. Often, extreme, constant anxiety—fear of the future, fear that “I
can’t handle it” and the results will be awful— creates physical and emotional distress. Physically, it can
cause or aggravate endrocrine, gastrointestinal, and cardiovascular problems (Hanson & Mendius, 2009).
Emotionally, it can cause or aggravate depression as well as sleep, attention, learning, social, and
behavioral problems.
Fortunately, through relaxation, many parents and children can reduce excessive anxiety. Anxiety and
relaxation are opposites. It’s hard—perhaps impossible—to feel anxious when relaxed. For some children,
relaxation has produced important benefits:
Sufficient research supports the proposition that relaxation training can be both effective and efficient in
helping children overcome cognitive (e.g., enhanced reading ability, reduced impulsivity), behavioral (e.g.,
greater attention-to-task, lowered hyperactivity), and affective (e.g., improved self-concepts, lowered
anxiety) difficulties. (Margolis, 1990, p. 226)
But relaxation is easier to prescribe than do when people don’t know how to relax. This column will show
you how.
Three Relaxation Strategies
Below are three relaxation strategies that might help you and your child. If either of you, however, has a
history of psychological trauma, susceptibility to panic attacks, or other psychological or physical
difficulties, consultant with a psychologist or psychiatrist before using any of these approaches.
Meditation: Meditation is an easy to employ technique to induce relaxation. It becomes increasingly easier
to employ with daily practice. Although it can be used at almost any time, it is best practiced for 20 minutes
daily in the same place, at the same time. Meditation works best if not employed immediately after eating
or strenuous exercise. Benson identified the four basic elements: (a) a quiet environment, free from external
distraction; (b) silent or subvocal repetition of a particular word or phrase; © elimination of all thoughts
and distractions from the mind by adopting a passive attitude which allows you or your child to gently
discard intruding thoughts by continued repetition of the selected word or phrase and accepting intrusive
thoughts as natural; (d) sitting in a comfortable position. Meditation is often facilitated by keeping the eyes
closed.
Progressive Muscle Relaxation: Progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) is based on two of Edmund
Jacobson’s (1938) premises: (a) people cannot be simultaneously relaxed and stressed, and (b) mental
relaxation is a natural consequence of physical relaxation. Because many children and adults are habituated
to high levels of muscle tension, they are normally unaware of the excess tension in their muscles. By
sitting and alternately tensing and relaxing major muscle groups for brief periods of time (e.g., tense five to
eight seconds and relax 15 seconds) children and adults become acutely aware of when muscles are tensed
and relaxed. Because muscles tend to relax easily immediately after tensing, children and adults learn to
intentionally relax (i.e., completely rest) their muscles. Children and adults can learn to relax particular
muscle groups so that the technique can be unobtrusively employed throughout the day when these muscle
groups are not needed to perform the task at hand; for example, the thighs and non-dominant arm can be
relaxed when reading, the shoulders when standing. Thus progressive muscle relaxation is a portable
technique children and adults can employ at almost any opportunity. Edward Charlesworth and Ronald
Nathan (1984) provide excellent step-by-step procedures and scripts to initiate progressive relaxation. You
can download PMR audio programs (e.g. Lori Lite) from Amazon.com and similar sites.
Diaphragmatic Breathing. This takes only a few minutes and can teach you and your child how to relax
when faced with an anxiety-provoking situation. Here’s how Aggie Casey and Herbert Benson (2006)
described it:
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Find a comfortable, quiet place to sit or lie down.
Place one hand on your chest and the other on your abdomen, just below your belly button. Take a
slow, deep breath. Your lower hand should move more than the hand on your chest.
Concentrate on letting your abdomen expand fully, drawing air down into your lungs. Notice your
belly rising and falling with each breath.
Now practice this breathing for several minutes. (p. 35)
Of course, in an anxiety-provoking situation, you need not lie down. Just breath slowly from your
diaphragm when sitting or standing.
Some Guidance
Try all three. Find the one that works for you and the one that works for your child—they may differ.
Chances are your child will prefer PMR; you might like all three. (My favorites are daily meditation and,
when facing anxiety-provoking situations, slow diaphragmatic breathing.) Ask your child to try a strategy
only after you’re highly comfortable with it. Relax with him, using the same strategy. Try to get an expert
to teach you how to use the strategy. An expert can be a friend with years of experience using the strategy
or a certified expert, like a psychologist, special educator, or occupational therapist who has taken courses
in relaxation and practices it daily. Ask your child’s guidance counselor to use the strategy with him, three
or four times a week. Be patient: Give the strategy six to eight weeks to start showing benefits. But then
again, patience and relaxation go hand in hand.
How to Reduce Anxiety: Yours and Your Child’s Part
II
By: Gary G. Brannigan,
Disabilities: Beating The Odds.
Ph.D. and Howard Margolis, Ed.D. coauthors of Reading
NB: This article is written for the parents of children who have Anxiety and related problems. We publish it
here because we know that therapists like to give their client's caregivers as much information as possible.
Because excessive anxiety is so harmful to children and their parents, this post will describe two relaxation
strategies, offer guidance, and discuss how parents of children in special education can request relaxation
training as a related service.
Relaxation Strategies
Because they work, Visual Imagery and Count Your Breath have withstood the test of time. But like all
relaxation strategies, they work better for some people. If one of these works for you, and you enjoy it,
stick with it. Don’t complicate your life by adding another strategy. The same is true for your child: Let
him use the one that works for him, the one he enjoys.
Visual Imagery. Visual imagery asks your child to imagine a peaceful scene, such as waves lapping the
shore on a hot day. Many excellent scripts (e.g., Smith, 1999) and inexpensive mp3 downloads (Lori Lite,
Amazon) can set the scene. Mp3 files have music, narrative, distinct environmental sounds, such as birds
singing, or a combination of these. If practical, when using mp3 files, let your child use an mp3 player. To
personalize the mp3 file, you or your child’s teacher might make an mp3 file by reading a script into a
digital voice recorder. Some children love the personalization—it makes them more comfortable and
relaxed. Of course, the subject matter of the mp3 file or script must be appropriate for your child; the scene
must be familiar to him and appropriate for his age.
For your child to develop his imagery abilities, he’ll probably need practice. In preparatory sessions, you or
a relaxation trainer, such as a school psychologist or guidance counselor, might ask him to describe all he
sees in a self-induced scene, down to the most minute detail. The trainer might then ask him to share what
he imagined. If he has problems imagining, the trainer might ask him to focus on adjectives and colors. For
example, the trainer might ask your child to repeat, “Relaxation is peaceful and comfortable. It’s warm and
yellow like the sun.” If he then closes his eyes and imagines sitting near a pond on a sunny day, seeing the
top of the water sparkle in yellow sunlight, and feeling the sun warm his body, he may soon feel relaxed.
Or the trainer might show him large color photos of scenes he finds familiar, enjoyable, and relaxing, and
ask him to describe it in detail, when he’s looking at it, and later, when he can’t see it, but can only imagine
it.
Count Your Breath. Whereas visualization or imagery sounds complex and difficult, Count Your Breath
sounds simple and easy, and it is. You just have to do a little modeling and your child has to practice a bit.
Here’s a typical set of directions to give him:
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Breathe in slowly and deeply and smoothly and hold your breath. As you breathe in, I’ll slowly
count to 4 for you.
Now, hold your breath while I’ll slowly count to 4 for you.
Now, slowly and smoothly let your breath out while I’ll slowly count to 4 for you.
Let’s start again.
I suggest that you start with four rounds of breathing in and out, twice daily, and gradually build up to 5minutes, twice daily. As he becomes adept at counting his breath, have him count silently to himself.
Instead of saying, “I’ll slowly count to 4 for you,” teach him to count slowly to himself. You might teach
him to say, “As I breathe in, I’ll slowly count to 4 in my mind.”
Guidance
As with all relaxation strategies, see what works for your child, what he can do comfortably, what he likes.
Make it fun. Model it. Let him see that it’s fun for you. If you find teaching him is too difficult, have a
relaxation expert teach him. Be sure, however, that he likes the expert and looks forward to their sessions.
In the final analysis, if he doesn’t like a strategy, drop it. It won’t work.
Starting to see results may take four to six weeks of daily relaxation. The key word in the previous sentence
is not weeks, but daily. Daily practice is needed for children to benefit and for relaxation to become a way
of life.
In addition to lessened anxiety, you might well see these benefits: better attention, better sleep, less
impulsivity, less frustration, better social relations. And if anxiety had been interfering with learning to
read, better reading. Frey (1980), for example, found that relaxation training had a positive effect on the
reading achievement of remedial readers. Any one of these benefits can support relaxation training as a
related service.
Related Service
If your child is eligible for special education under the Individuals with Disabilities Education
Improvement Act of 2004 (IDEA-2004), and excessive anxiety has been blocking his progress, consider
asking for daily relaxation training as a related service. Although schools rarely have provided it—
historically, it’s not been part of the curriculum—if your child needs the support of relaxation training to
benefit from special education, the school should provide it as part of his Individualized Education Program
(IEP). Support for this request comes from IDEA-2004’s definition of related services:
Related services means … such developmental, corrective, and other supportive services as are required to
assist a child with a disability to benefit from special education. (IDEA-2004 Regulations § 300.34 )
Whenever you make a request for a related service, be sure that:
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Your child needs the service to benefit from special education.
You have the documentation needed to justify the service, including reports from experts.
You make your request in writing, date it, and save copies of it.
If the school rejects your request, it must provide detailed reasons in writing. If it rejects your request, ask,
in person and in writing, “How will you ensure that my child’s anxiety difficulties, difficulties that are
interfering with his ability to benefit from special education, are effectively remediated? How will I quickly
know if your way of lessening his anxiety is working?” For more information on related services, IEPs, and
resolving conflicts with schools, see chapters 8 and 11 of Reading Disabilities: Beating the Odds (Error!
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