3 Underlying Causes of Worry: How to Overcome Anxiety
As a high school administrator, much of my day is supposed to be centered on improving teacher instruction, ensuring school facilities promote learning, and general supervision of day-to-day routines. However, over time, I have discovered that I now dedicate more time to counseling young adults through anxiety in lieu of my traditional responsibilities. This added time commitment for counseling has also exponentially grown since 2020. To guide my students well, a determination of the source for student anxiety is crucial. Once determined, I am then able to offer practical advice that leaves them encouraged, humble, and energized.
The combination of apprehensiveness combined with the culturally posited idea that we can do anything we put our minds to often reduces a child’s ability to grow both academically and socially. This often results in children being paralyzed in the grip of anxiety. If we seek to guide our children well, we need them learn to outsource their worry.
Let’s examine three mannerisms that tend to be sources for a child’s increased anxiety.
- “Love of self”. This is obviously selfishness, self-aggrandization, and an inward focus. Excessive anxiety can be caused when people regularly promote themselves and look inward for their sole source of strength. Modern media and social media overload our kids with the idea to “get all they can get” and that we can do anything if we just determine to do so. Unfortunately, life has a way of proving otherwise. As a result, they struggle with their self-image, underachieve academically, and sometimes build poor relationships. These actions multiply anxiety, and when they look to “self” to cope, they repeat a cycle of struggles that inevitably yields more anxiety and worry. Due to their youth, children lack both the wisdom and skills required to both perceive and handle anxiety correctly. Students verbalize their need for when they make comments such as, “School sucks,” or “I hate life.” Selfishness further manifests itself in name-calling, fighting, and sometimes outright assaults when life doesn’t go a student’s way.
- “Bragging”. Bragging is drawing more attention to the things in life that we believe are valuable. It is often accompanied by exaggeration. Thus, bragging becomes a slippery slope toward lying. When lies are added to bragging, selfishness pops up in the form of self-aggrandization. When a person believes their own lies, this leads them to presume their self-engineered counterfeit is equipped to handle reality appropriately. Regrettably, human conscience reminds us that we are being dishonest, and recognition of this tends to multiply anxious feelings.
- “Pride”. Pride is effectively insourcing our concerns. Pride works from two angles. The most witnessed form of pride is arrogance. This is self-confidence that creates an inaccurate internal picture about one’s worth and/or importance. Secondly, pride is also seen when a person succumbs to self-pity. This inaccurate external picture is often caused by a flawed internal worldview. It is a view that if external circumstances don’t match their expectations, the world must change “because I say so.”
All three mannerisms are essentially selfish outlooks. By assisting children to understand that pride is an underlying root of anxiety, we position them to limit their anxiety. We can then teach them to outsource their worry. However, selfish pride comes naturally. Outsourcing worry comes supernaturally.
Children naturally want to take care of their own problems, but personal experience often reveals that they don’t do it well. This just adds to their anxiety. They really need a new nature secured through a higher power.
Looking outside of ourselves for assistance is diverting our faith from self onto another source. But faith is only as strong as the person in whom we place it, so we must be purposeful when we do this. Misplaced faith increases anxiety. Getting our students to comprehend that a supernatural power is sometimes necessary to lessen anxiety is indeed counter-cultural, but reality informs everyone that internalizing worry complicates matters.
Rather than internalizing worry, we should guide others to instead appeal to something more powerful and selfless than we are. If we truly seek to help others overcome their anxiety, we really should advise them to outsource their worry.
Dr. Anthony is a cancer-survivor, secondary administrator, author, speaker, and advocate for wise living. He is the author of Finite Obstacles ~ Infinite Truth. He adds value to others’ lives by teaching people how to overcome challenges, how to lead with grace and accountability, and by advocating for wise choices based on truth. Learn more at www.DrRobAnthony.com, and https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-rob-anthony/.
