Mentoring Young Adults
with Anxiety:
3 Strategies for Success
By Ken Rabow
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.