Welcome to the sixth module of LUNA! This week, you and your child will learn how to use coping skills to manage anxiety. We will also give you detailed instructions for two specific skills:
- Deep breathing, and
- Grounding practice (or mindfulness)
You will also continue to help your child practice the activities in their plan of action while they work on their coping skills.
You will spend about 45 minutes reading, watching videos, and doing activities. Your child will also spend a couple of minutes every day this week practicing their coping skills and exposure activities. We encourage you to take breaks and come back to this material as much as you need.
Keep Practicing Exposure Activities
As we touched on last week, completing exposure activities in lots of different situations and in multiple different ways will help your child better overcome their anxiety. Research actually shows that this is one of the most important treatment skills for reducing anxiety. George and Sophia know that they have some more fears they need to work on, so they have been thinking about what fears they will tackle next.
Using the Weekly Practice Plan worksheet, help your child make another schedule for this week. If your child would like to continue focusing on their first plan of action this week, that’s wonderful! Encourage them to keep going! You and your child should look at their schedule from last week and think about how you can add more activities, change some, or try harder ones if your child feels up to it.
If your child is ready to move on to a different fear, have them create a new plan of action. You should refer to Module 4 and use the My Plan of Action worksheet to create a new plan based on a different fear. Then, you and your child should make a schedule for this week based off the new plan of action!
Recognizing Anxiety in the Body
Back in Module 2, you learned that body signals can communicate information to you about what emotion you are feeling. When your child feels worried or anxious, their muscles might get tense, they might start shaking, or they might get a stomachache. This image illustrates some different ways our body can signal to us that we are anxious.
Remember to look out for these signs in your child as they progress through LUNA!
There are strategies your child can use to decrease their anxiety levels along with the physical sensations that come with anxiety. We call these strategies coping skills or coping tools. Coping skills can help your child feel calmer in the moment so that they feel more prepared to face whatever is making them anxious. A key part of coping skills is that they should help your child face their fears rather than avoid them! Coping skills should help calm down your child’s mind and body when they are feeling too overwhelmed to face their fears.
If your child feels anxious most of the time, practicing coping skills every day can help them lower their baseline anxiety levels to a more manageable level over time. Coping skills can also help your child while they are taking steps to face their fears. Your child can use coping skills to help them approach a feared situation that they would usually avoid. Coping skills will not get rid of your child’s anxiety completely, but they will help your child manage their anxiety better.
Watch the video below to learn more about coping skills.
