Mentoring Young Adults
with Anxiety:
3 Strategies for Success

They want to move forward, but anxiety keeps taking over. We bring them back into their body, and the anxiety that ran everything starts to quiet.

When a young person comes to me who is having trouble performing the simplest duties; organizing their room, going out and meeting new friends, or making a phone call, we as mentors find that at the root of these challenges is their trouble expressing the underlying anxieties that cause them.

“What if I say the wrong thing?”

“What if they laugh at me?

“What if I have an anxiety attack and they see my weakness?”

The challenge is that these young adults are not in their bodies, they are in their heads 24/7.

We use proven techniques to get them back into their bodies and start believing that, in the mentor–mentee process, they will feel safe and slowly start to have control of themselves once again; body, mind, and spirit.

We work on ways to get back into the body: diaphragmatic breathing, short visualization exercises to focus on the breath, and quieting the negative self-speak.
The most important ones: daily routines to get to sleep and wake up and better and better times. 5 minutes a day of room clean-up. Creating a list of three things they would like to do.

This is just the beginning of our process, and although it takes a month or two to start seeing the changes in their child, most parents are amazed within six months how the anxiety has changed from a level of seven or eight as the floor to two or three as the floor. 

If you recognized your child in those three questions, you already understand something most people never see from the outside. They are not refusing to clean the room or make the call. They are negotiating with a voice in their head every single time, and losing.

That voice does not answer to reasoning. It does not answer to being told to relax, or to try harder, or that it is not a big deal. It only answers to a body that has started to feel safe again. That is why we start where we start.

The floor coming down from an eight to a three is not a promise I make lightly. It is what happens when a young person gets their body back and stops living entirely in their head.

I would like to hear what this looks like in your home. Not the tidy version, the real one. The morning that took two hours. The call that never got made. The room that has looked the same since last winter.

Click here and let’s find a time for you to tell me what you are living with, and I will tell you how mentoring can help.

You may not be ready to talk yet, I can understand that. Taking the next step to find help for your child should be done when you are ready. If you want, check out our Pricing Page. If you would rather look before you talk, see who would be sitting with them while they learn to slow it down: Meet Our Mentors. Keep reading about mental health: We Are Not Our Labels