Feb 12, 2015 By David Singer 5 min read

Just by their title alone, parents face enough stress to knot themselves into pretzel-like contortions. The anxiety that can launch you past slight neurosis to full-on panic attack doesn’t ever go away, and it starts in kindergarten.

“Imagine a world without stress, though. Stress forces us to adapt and be challenged, it makes us try harder. Similarly with anxiety, it makes us aware of potential problems. But those are ideal and often fleeting modes of stress and anxiety,” said Christina Hostutler, a counselor at Outreach Teen & Family Services.

Hostutler, in a partnership with the Youth Steering Committee, gave a presentation to a group of Upper St. Clair parents and their children Feb. 11 at the Boyce-Mayview Recreation Center on how to identify and manage healthy levels of stress and anxiety. The biggest problem for children, she said, is having the communication skills with their parents to effectively share what they’re feeling.

The paradox, Hostutler pointed out, is that the best way to prevent unhealthy stress is to identify specific triggers, but the nature of anxiety has a person recalling an embarrassing moment or frustrating task and those memories or emotions color the present. For both children and adults, when a vicious cycle like this starts, it’s time to shut the brain off for a bit.

“Deep abdominal breathing is the most simple approach. Close your eyes, place both hands on your lower stomach, inhale and consciously let your diaphragm expand as far out as it can to a count of four, then exhale,” she said.

When those “non-associative” episodes of stress happen – when it seemingly comes out of nowhere – Hostutler said that’s the bursting point of various triggers that a person hasn’t been dealing with. An unorthodox approach that often works well with children, she said, is to set aside a time to worry.

“Sounds crazy, right? But you want to set aside a worry time. ‘Alright, I’m going to worry about this problem at 3 o’clock for 10 minutes.’ It gets it out, and, in some instances, students would do this in front a mirror. And one had an irrational fear of clowns, so when she saw herself saying these worries out loud, she stopped worrying about them after two instances of doing it.”

Hostutler detailed other strategies for dealing with stress at controlled intervals. One she called the “DVD technique,” which calls for a person to “fast-forward and rewind” through potential and actual scenarios that have happened. Then imagine the worst possible outcome, accept it, and gradually improve perceptions about it. Also have “backup DVDs,” she said, or thoughts on deck that are happy and remind you of better times.

Part of it is physical.

“Pay attention to where you hold tension. For me, it’s my shoulders. Most people, it’s their shoulders or jaw. At the end of the day, your body parts may feel exhausted and you don’t know why. Try and recognize when you’re tensing up and relax and roll your muscles or massage them,” she said.

Then, there’s the ultimate implosion of anxiety, the panic attack.

“It feels like you’re dying. You get light headed, your blood moves to the center of your body so you feel weak, your vision will probably fade a bit. And the most obvious symptom is your heart racing to the point where it feels like a heart attack,” Hostutler said.

Recognizing and pacing yourself through possible symptoms helps ease the passing of a panic attack, she said.

And there are just bad nights. Homework went on for two hours, a fight starts, or a forgotten project crops up and is due. Forget about trying to go to bed with things like that on your mind.

“The stress hormone cortisol is flushing through your brain at this point,” Hostutler said, “and exercise is pretty much the only way to get rid of it. When you try to go to bed with it fooling yourself into thinking you’re relaxed, it’s about the same as going to bed and ‘trying to sleep.’ It won’t happen. Do 15-20 minutes of cardio and you’ll feel relaxed and able to sleep.”

Other times, distractions can interfere with sleep, thus compounding future stress and anxiety.

“My 6- and 9-year-old children use this iPad app called White Noise,” said Marlo, an Upper St. Clair mother of two, “and they put on sound mixes of rain, ‘car rain’ and forest sounds. It just helps them relax.”

It all comes down to advice anyone has probably heard before: worry about the things you can control and not about things you can’t.

“The old mission (for dealing with social anxiety) was making oneself feel good and to make others feel good about you, but that’s unrealistic,” Hostutler said, “you can make yourself feel good more effectively by encouraging others to feel good about themselves.”