Anxiety in children and teens

Is your child struggling with anxiety?

Children and young people with generalised anxiety disorder have persistent and disturbing worries on a daily basis. Worrying about anything and everything. Generalised anxiety disorder in children and young people can lead to depression if left untreated.

How does anxiety affect children and young people?

Children and young people can experience challenges in their lives, just as adults do. Anxiety only becomes a problem when your child’s worries are out of proportion with relatively harmless situations. This may feel overwhelming and interfere with their everyday lives, education and social & family relationships.

Often children and young people experience physical symptoms such as agitation, feeling short of breath, feeling hot and sweaty, muscle aches, nausea and heart palpitations. Often those who have generalised anxiety disorder will have other types of anxiety such as social anxiety or specific phobia.

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When to seek treatment for anxiety in children and teens

It is likely that children and young people struggling with generalised anxiety disorder may display some of the following symptoms:
Struggling with sleep
Being more irritable and angry, feeling out of control with angry outbursts
Being much more clingy and struggling to be separated from parents
Struggling to concentrate
Complaining of feeling physically unwell such as having frequent tummy aches
Constantly worrying or having negative thoughts
What do Onebright offer?
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) is the most popular form of therapy for a range of issues that fall under the umbrella term ‘anxiety’ - we use an evidence-based, ‘here and now’ approach to facilitate recovery. We can offer a wide range of support to children and young people including support from our early intervention team (preventing smaller problems with anxiety and low mood developing into something bigger), parent-led support (supporting parents of primary aged children to manage anxiety or behaviours of concern), CBT and trauma focused CBT.
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Benefit/results for child and family
Working with a therapist to face and overcome your difficulties can be a challenging and daunting prospect, but one that can also be extremely rewarding. By working with a therapist, you and/or your child or young person can better understand the difficulties that they are experiencing, and also how to manage and work through them. Working alongside your therapist, you can learn the tools and approaches that work best for you and your child to help you take back control and get back to a life that's worth living.
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The support that we offer

The support that Onebright will offer will include being instructed in a number of techniques that can lower anxiety, including:

  • Problem solving skills:  often in generalised anxiety disorder young people can focus on worries that don’t exist whilst ignoring practical problems, being able to identify and solve problems affectively can build confidence when potential problems occur in the future.
  • Emotional recognition: Young people with generalised anxiety disorder often have a difficult time managing difficult emotions and assume that they will be overwhelmed by big emotions.  Therapy will support them to understand that these emotions are important, won’t last indefinitely and give life meaning .
  • Decreasing physical anxiety: Teaching relaxation and breathing techniques that can help regulate the nervous system, working to calm both the body and mind.
  • Feeling the fear and doing it anyway: Young people will be supported to identify the situations, thoughts and physical sensations that increase anxiety, developing a hierarchy of fears ranked from least to most feared, gradually exposing them to feared situations to find out something new about the scary situation.
  • Thought challenging: Helping young people to identify and challenge negative thoughts, by taking their thoughts to court, looking for the evidence of common negative assumptions and considering what else might be going on instead.

Get started by answering some simple questions below or call 020 8129 0558

Begin your journey

The Onebright client liaison team are available Monday to Friday between 9am-5pm (excluding bank holidays).
Your child must be aged 5-17 years to access our therapy services.
Your child’s assessment will cost £100 (this includes consultation and report).
After your assessment, if your child is recommended for therapy, this will cost £150 per appointment.

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