ASTRO: Challenging Anxious Thoughts

As your child completes the activities in their plan of action, it may be helpful for them to view them as an experiment. Encourage your child to use exposure activities to test their anxious thoughts and find out if their thoughts were right or wrong.  

For example, Sophia thinks that she will embarrass herself if she tries to make new friends. Instead of believing this anxious thought right away, she puts it to the test to see what will really happen when she tries to make a friend.  

Keeping track of exposure practices in the Plan of Action Activity Log may help your child gain a new perspective. They may find that an activity they were really anxious about ended up not being too difficult. Or they may find that an activity they thought would end poorly had good outcomes.  

This week, you and your child will focus on the last column of the Activity Log: “Did I learn anything new?” By filling out this last column, your child will be putting their anxious thoughts to the test and challenging unhelpful perspectives. 

Look back at George’s Activity Log as an example. You will see that most of the time, his exposure activities go better than he thinks they will.

Exposure activities will not always work out perfectly and many of them will be very challenging. But by focusing on what they’ve learned, your child will be pushed to entertain the idea that their anxious thoughts might not be telling them the truth after all.

Helping Your Child Reflect on What They Learn

It will be important for you to help your child process their thoughts after each exposure activity to help them recognize patterns in their anxious thinking, understand how their worries may be exaggerated, and strengthen their confidence. While you help your child reflect, be sure to keep the thinking errors of probability and consequences in mind. Setting aside time for processing and reflection is what will help your child identify their thinking errors and realize just how capable they are of overcoming anxiety. They may learn that their feared outcomes are often less likely or less severe than they initially believed, and they may also start recognizing their ability to tolerate discomfort and uncertainties. Reflecting on exposure activity practices with your child will reinforce your child’s new ideas about their fears and weaken their old, unhelpful ideas. 

Since it is most effective to learn by doing, we want to emphasize that your child should complete their exposure activities first, and then you may help them reflect on what they have learned after.

If verbal encouragement is motivating for your child, we recommend that you offer them praise after they complete an activity. It will also be helpful to go through some reflection questions with your child after an activity or spark up a conversation to get them thinking about their fears.  

Sometimes, it can be hard for kids and teens to think about their feared outcome after an exposure activity. If this is the case for your child, you can help them by starting the conversation. For example, you might say, “It seems like you thought you would get stung by a bee while we were outside, but no bees bothered you after all! And even though you were nervous to go outside, it looked like you enjoyed yourself”.  

By starting a conversation in this way, you will be prompting your child to reflect on their experience and think about their feared outcomes in a new light. Your child may begin to realize that they are 1) overestimating how likely it is that a feared outcome will happen, or 2) overestimating how bad it will be if a feared outcome does happen. Ideally, over time, your child will be able to apply what they’ve learned during exposure activities to other situations in their life when they encounter fears or worries.