Sugar and | Caffeine: The Deleterious Effects | on Your Anxious Child

As any expectant mother can tell you, avoiding caffeine and sugar while pregnant is one of the most important dietary decisions you can make. Why? Because both substances have powerful effects on the human body – effects that cross the placenta and reach the baby as it develops in the womb. It should come as no surprise or shock then, that these same substances continue to have a powerful effect on children after they are born. While adults often develop a tolerance to both sugar and caffeine and can consume larger quantities, children remain hypersensitive to them throughout their formative years.
If your child suffers from anxiety, you should take a careful look at his or her diet. Monitor the sugar and caffeine intake. Cutting back on both of these substances can help ease the anxiety and reduce stress more effectively. Want to know more? Let’s take a look at how sugar and caffeine work within the human body.
The Effect of Caffeine on the Body
You have your morning coffee for a reason: it wakes you up. This is because coffee contains caffeine, which is a stimulant. Caffeine speeds up the processes of the central nervous system; in fact, just 15 minutes after your morning coffee, adrenaline floods your being. This means that your heart rate increases, your respiration rate increases, and the production of stomach acids goes up. You even create more urine. All of these processes have the effect of “waking” you up.
Children are more sensitive to caffeine than adults, and the same process occurs in a kid who has a Coke with lunch as it does in mom who drives by Starbucks on the way to work. The adrenaline rush, increased respiration and heart rate, and stomach acid production all take place in kids as they do in adults. Caffeine also communicates with the adrenal glands, getting them to release additional sugar stored in the liver. This leads to increased sugar cravings in both kids and adults, which leads us to our discussion of sugar and its effect on the body.
The Effect of Sugar on the Body
Just as kids are more caffeine sensitive than adults, they are also more easily affected by sugar. Although the research varies on what exactly sugar can do to the human body, they have proven that sugar compromises the functions of the immune system. This means that sugar interferes with the white blood cells’ ability to ward off germs. This leads to an overall suppression of immune function, which can be problematic for developing kids who are exposed to a host of germs on a daily basis.
It seems, too, that sugar can wreck several other areas of your child’s life. Kids who eat excessive amounts of sugar have more behavioral issues, lower attention spans, and problems with their ability to learn than kids whose sugar consumption is limited. Sugar can also spike highs and lows in the blood stream, which can lead to both physical and emotional issues. Excess consumption of sugar can also lead to childhood obesity, which is a growing epidemic in the United States.
Dietary Measures to Reduce Anxiety
Now that we have a clearer understanding of how caffeine and sugar can affect the human body, let’s take a look at how anxiety works in your child. When your child feels nervous about a given situation – like an upcoming exam or riding the bus – a panic response is triggered in his or her body. Adrenaline and cortisol begin coursing through the veins. The heart rate and respiration increases as he or she begins begins to shake and sweat. Moreover, may experience racing thoughts, or may feel like  he or she is losing control or dying.
Does this sound familiar? The anxiety response is highly similar to the effect that caffeine has on the central nervous system. So if your child is already feeling nervous, caffeine will simply magnify this response. Sugar doesn’t help – with the rapid highs and lows it sparks in the blood sugar as well as the behavioral and learning issues that come along with it – which can all contribute to the symptoms of anxiety.
As a parent, it is up to you to step in and reduce your child’s consumption of both substances. Experts agree that children should never exceed 50 mg of caffeine per day, which is the amount contained in one can of soda. Sugar consumption should be strictly monitored, and this includes consumption of fructose, sucrose, and other types of sugars. Until your child can handle the anxiety, limiting the access to these substances is one of the best things you can do to help. One of the most powerful ways to do so is to set a good example. Show solidarity by scaling back your consumption of these substances too, until your child can master the anxiety.
Reducing Stress Levels Through Self-Help Methods
In addition to making some judicious dietary changes, you should also take a look at your child’s stress level and find ways to help reduce or cope with stress effectively. A self-help regimen can be purchased online to help you incorporate techniques that both reduce the overall amount of stress in life, as well as give the coping tools to deal with panic attacks as they flare up. Some of these techniques include yoga, diaphragmatic breathing, laughter therapy, meditation, visualization, and cognitive behavioral techniques.
As with reducing your sugar and caffeine intake, you can set a good example by making use of these practices in your own life. Make stress reduction a family priority and you help on two levels. First, making everyone in the family participate reduces the stigmatization of anxiety disorders – it’s no longer the “elephant in the room” and your child no longer feels ostracized, weird, or alone. Secondly, stress reduction can profoundly reward everyone in your family as you learn to deal with life’s issues with grace.
Helping your child combat anxiety is one of the best gifts you can give... By changing the diet and helping  learn techniques to handle it effectively, you are giving your child the tools they need to live a happy and healthy life. Click here to learn more...

Striking a | Sensible Balance for Your Adolescent | in Terms of Academic Achievement and Anxiety

During the course of adolescence, it’s not at all uncommon for students to begin to feel the pressures of academia. As they labor through standardized testing and begin preparations for college, many students begin to fear that their entire futures are based on their grades. This pressure, added to the normal stress that surrounds adolescence, can cause teenagers to develop anxiety disorders, especially anxiety that deals with academic achievement.
As a parent, you can do a lot to help your teen overcome this anxiety so that it doesn’t cripple their academic performance or take over their life. To get started, it helps to understand how anxiety works as a biochemical process, and how it can interfere with your teen’s ability to do well in school. Then you can formulate a plan for helping your adolescent overcome anxiety, using a self-help program.
Understanding the Process of Anxiety
Let’s start by looking at the biochemical process known as the “fight or flight” response which is the body and mind’s first response to immediate stress. If you have ever had a close call while driving, then you know what the fight or flight response feels like: your pulse rate speeds up, your blood pressure shoots up, and your breathing becomes rapid and shallow. You may also start shaking and sweating. Mentally, you may have racing thoughts, feel like you are losing control, or fear that you might die. These changes are wrought in your body as cortisol, also known as the “stress hormone,” and adrenaline flood your body in response to a perceived threat.
If your child is having trouble at school, this fight or flight response can be provoked at any time that she feels pressure to perform academically. This can mean a standardized test, a regular exam in class, performance anxiety in class (such as having to make a presentation or recite a poem), or doing homework. If you have ever experienced this level of anxiety, you know how difficult it is to continue on with your life, much less try to accomplish something academic in the immediate aftermath of a panic attack. So teaching your child to cope with these emotions effectively – or even head them off before they become an issue – is the best way to help them out of this constant cycle of panic and despair.
How Anxiety Affects Academic Performance
It’s interesting to note that some anxiety surrounding academic performance can actually be desirable. Some amount of anxiety actually spurs the motivation to do the work. For example, if a big exam is looming ahead, your child may be compelled to study if she feels anxious about doing well. But there is a point at which anxiety can run away with your child’s emotions – and with it, the ability to do well in school. To combat this level of anxiety, it helps to know the four common ways it can manifest itself.
The 4 Issues Concerning Academic Anxiety
There are four core ways in which academic anxiety can be manifested:

• Deficient study skills – students with anxiety may develop poor study skills, such as cramming before an exam, rather than actually learning the material. This means that when your student takes the test, she will forget many of the answers, which will result in a bad grade. By learning and developing proper study skills, your student can eliminate much of the anxiety that goes along with test preparation and homework.
• Interference with tasks – Anxiety can derail a student’s progress, as they develop behaviors that interfere with the task at hand. For example, your student may watch the clock constantly during an exam rather than answer questions efficiently. A self-help program can help your child implement stress-reduction techniques that will help her stay on track during an exam.
• Physical symptoms – all of the physical symptoms of a fight or flight response – shaking, sweatiness, nausea, elevated heart rate and blood pressure, and increased pulse rate – can cause your child to do poorly in school, or begin avoiding it altogether. By learning simple relaxation techniques, your child can combat these physical symptoms.
• Worry – constant “doomsday” thinking, worrying, racing thoughts, and other destructive mental patterns can keep your child from doing well in school simply because they prevent your child from being able to focus. By implementing stress reduction techniques, you can help your child learn to be in the moment and halt negative thought patterns before they take hold.

Striking a Balance
As a parent, you need to help your child learn how to deal with stress effectively on two fronts: general stress reduction which decreases the overall amount of stress in your child’s life, and specific techniques designed to halt a panic attack as it begins. A good self-help program can help you attack on both fronts, giving your child the tools she needs to be successful in school. These tools can also benefit her for the rest of her life; for as we all know, stress does not end when you graduate.
Some techniques that can reduce the overall amount of stress in your teen’s life include:

• Yoga – known as meditation through movement, yoga has been touted for its ability to help you release and reduce stress, find stability, and harness your focus.
• Meditation – by focusing on being “in the moment” for a short period of time during the day, you can cut back on the level of stress in your life while finding balance and harmony.
• Visualization – by visualizing certain situations, such as an upcoming exam, and then visualizing the outcome as positive, your child can begin to overcome her anxiety about a specific aspect of her life.

Panic attacks are sudden onsets of panic induced by a perceived threat in your child’s environment. For example, your child may suddenly get hit with a panic attack on the way to class to take an exam. For this situation, immediate techniques that bring about calm are the best bet:

• Diaphragmatic breathing – by learning to breathe deeply, your child can lower her blood pressure and heart rate and increase the amount of oxygen circulating in her body. This can help prevent hyperventilation and restore calm.
• Scripted response – by writing out a script to follow in advance, your child can pull out the script during emergencies and walk herself through a calming exercise.
• Progressive muscle relaxation (PMR) – by alternately tensing and relaxing the muscle groups in the body, your child can promote relaxation, blood flow, and oxygen flow through the body, halting the fight or flight response.

A self-help regimen can help your teen learn and implement these techniques so that she can succeed in academia and combat stress in her daily life. Click here to learn more...

Bullying and its | Effect on Children | with Anxiety

Bullying has long been a problem for children, in both schools and social situations. Through the years there have been many attempts at overcoming it, but unfortunately they have never been entirely effective. When your child already suffers from anxiety you are left with an even greater problem if bullying presents its ugly head. You’ll need to learn as much about bullying and its effect on children with anxiety, in order to support your child as best you can.

Bullying may take many forms, and includes the taunts on the school bus or while walking home from school, the spreading of vicious rumors, the social isolation from their peer groups, threats, and the theft of lunch money or other personal effects. Unfortunately it also may include beatings from other children that may not only leave your child’s pride hurt, but may also leave them physically injured.

Bullying will affect all children differently, but children who already suffer from anxiety are likely to be especially effected. They may also be targeted by bullies because of the way that they react to stress. This is because their anxiety is likely to make them want to run from or avoid the bully rather than confronting them, and this in itself can make them even more vulnerable to bullying.

How would you know that your child is suffering at the hands of a bully? Generally there are signs and symptoms that it is happening that go beyond your child seeming sad, or otherwise depressed. Remember that many children will not speak out against a bully, for fear of reprisals if the bully were to be caught and punished.

If the bully attends the same school as your child, you may notice that their grades begin to drop. This may have multiple causes beyond bullying, for instance the fact that your child’s increased anxiety levels are likely to be causing them to be distracted. It is hard to concentrate on school work when you are constantly afraid of what will happen later.
Where the bully is in the same class as your child, the child may start to skip classes in order to avoid encountering the bully. With the lack of classes your child’s learning will be impaired so that they will be unable to perform as well in tests or for their homework as they previously did.

In a similar way, your child may avoid clubs or after school activities. They may decide that they no longer want to ride the school bus, and start walking long routes instead to avoid the bully. There may be mood swings, with triggers that don’t make sense, and excuses given in order to avoid things that they previously enjoyed.

Anxiety in children is often caused by them being exposed long term to stressful events. In short their brain is so constantly switched into stress or fear mode that it becomes unable to relax from that mode. It also begins to associate the fearful events with innocent things that were happening at the same time.

Your child may seem permanently afraid or nervous, or may have full blown panic attacks. This can mean that walking to a particular class, or seeing the school bus arrive may cause them to start to panic. The brain has so strongly associated the bad event with innocent events, that experiencing the innocent event can trigger the fear response in order to try and help themselves avoid the perceived threat.

When a child is bullied they already experience a high level of stress. Their body prepares itself for fight or flight by releasing hormones that make your child feel nervous and jumpy. A child with anxiety already tends to have these hormones circulating, or else are easily pushed into panic, or fight or flight mode. When exposed to frequent episodes of bullying the child with anxiety will experience an increase in the severity of their symptoms-or may be pushed into a negative feedback loop, where they become increasingly anxious, focus on the perceived threat and this makes them even more anxious and likely to focus on it.

In fact, many studies have shown that bullying is often a trigger for childhood anxiety that may be with the child for years to come. It is logical therefore that a child who already suffers from anxiety would experience an increase in the severity of their pre-existing condition.

Performance at school, or achieving high grades is often a source of stress for children, so much so that it can be the root cause of some children’s anxiety. When bullied to the point that they begin to cut classes and their grades start slipping, it can cause a conflict. Their anxiety disorder is pushing them to try harder and do better, and yet their fear of bullies keeps them away from class. Bullying in this way can cause a particularly severe problem in children with anxiety.

Bullying may cause other effects for children with anxiety. Sleep loss is common because of the permanent presence of stress hormones, and because of the inability to relax. They may become over tired, and again this can negatively affect their grades.
Eating may be affected, with a loss of appetite being caused by their feelings of nervousness. This may lead to weight loss. Avoidance of the school cafeteria-where episodes of bullying are often seen to happen, or theft of their lunch money may mean that your child is regularly skipping their midday meal, and this too can compound their weight loss.

Bullying is a terrible thing for any child to experience, and may have long lasting effects that reach into adulthood when it comes to self esteem and the reaction to stress. It may affect their health, as well as their happiness. Yet bullying and its effect on children with anxiety will be particularly pronounced, and is likely to need a great deal of loving support not only from their school, but also their family.

If you suspect your child may be suffering from anxiety, click below to learn more about what you can do to help:
Click here to learn more about your child’s anxiety and what you can do to help