Ross Szabo, author of A Kids Book About Anxiety, talks about how all of our emotions and behaviors in life have pathways in our brains.
Ross Szabo, author of A Kids Book About Anxiety, talks about how all of our emotions and behaviors in life have pathways in our brains.
A Kids Book About Anxiety (view book)
Full Book Description:
This is a book about anxiety. Having anxiety doesn’t just mean you feel nervous sometimes or need to calm down. It means having an uncontrollable feeling that gets in the way of what you normally do. This book explores what anxiety is like and what life can look like when you’re able to manage to live with anxiety.
About the Author:
Ross Szabo is an award-winning pioneer of the youth mental health movement. During his 8 years as Director of Outreach at the National Mental Health Awareness Campaign, he helped create the first youth mental health speakers’ bureau in the country and personally spoke to over one million people. He is currently the Wellness Director at Geffen Academy at UCLA and CEO of the Human Power Project. He’s using both of these opportunities to change the way communities learn about mental health.
*If you want to be on a future episode of A Kids Book About: The Podcast or if you have a question you’d like us to consider, have a grownup email us at listen@akidspodcastabout.com and we’ll send you the details.
A Kids Book About: The Podcast
S1 E013, Ross Talks About Anxiety
[INTRODUCTION]
Matthew: What is anxiety?
Kai: A lot of people go through anxiety and it can be really stressing and just plain annoying.
Owen: Anxiety is a lot of stress and being under pressure.
Ross: Anxiety is a feeling that is extreme nervousness that doesn't go away.
Matthew: Welcome to A Kids Book About: The Podcast! I’m Matthew. I’m a teacher, a librarian, and I’m your host. The voices you heard at the top of our show were from Kai, Owen, and Ross.
Each week we talk about the big things going on in your world with a different author from our A Kids Book About series.
[MEET OUR GUEST]
Ross: Hey, my name is Ross Szabo. I am the wellness director at Geffen Academy at UCLA. So I teach a class that talks about mental health to students grade 6 through 12, once a week. And I am also the CEO of Human Power Project, which is a company that creates mental health curriculum for schools.
Matthew: I’ve interviewed a couple of CEOs on this podcast so far! CEO stands for “Chief Executive Officer”, which usually means that the person is the leader of a company or the main person in charge of a company.
Ross: I'm the author of A Kids Book About Anxiety.
Matthew: Ross has anxiety. He also works with lots of kids who have anxiety. Kids who may be just like you.
Ross: There are a lot of people who don't have anxiety or anxiety disorders. Anxiety disorders are the most common type of, of mental health disorder. And it impacts around 15 to 18% of people.
So, the vast majority of people listening to this don't have an anxiety disorder. They can feel nervous. They can feel scared. They can feel fear. They can feel all the normal range of emotions, but a massive majority of people do not have an anxiety disorder or anxiety.
Matthew: Anxiety can sometimes be a word that is misused. It’s very common to feel anxious when a big change is coming up, but that feeling of worry, unease, or nervousness, as Ross said at the beginning of the show, usually lasts for a short amount of time and then goes away. Anxiousness is not anxiety.
Let’s listen to Ross describe what it was like for him to feel anxiety when he was a kid.
Ross: So for me, especially when I was ages 5 to 10, the symptoms were pretty strong. And it would start with me feeling like there was like a tiny ball, like a little bouncy ball moving up through my chest. And by the time it got to my chest, it felt like the size of a baseball. And it was closing off my ability to like breathe. And I felt like the walls were caving in and I felt like I couldn't escape and I couldn't get out of a room.
A lot of times my symptoms were also just like uncontrollably crying.
So a lot of times we cry and something happened and it hurts. But when I had anxiety, it was like uncontrollable tears that I couldn't stop.
And so those were some of the symptoms, some other symptoms were I'd feel really hot, like I was sweating and I couldn't cool off, even in a room that wasn't warm. So, you know, I always tell people to kind of look for those physical or mental symptoms, if you feel like you're sweating and it's too hot, if you feel like the walls are caving in, if you feel like, uh, you know, you are kind of uncontrollably crying, like there's a big difference between the kind of mental symptoms versus the physical symptoms.
Matthew: Anxiety affects different people in different ways. But it also enters people’s lives differently.
Ross: There's a couple of different causes. There can be kind of situational anxiety. People have phobias about very common things, spiders, heights, the dark, closets, whatever it could be.
There's also biological anxiety that doesn't have a cause, where people feel a level of anxiety every single day that's uncontrollable.
So it is helpful to understand like, yes, some anxiety is kind of almost like exaggerated reaction to situations, but there is also a type of anxiety that's just constant and doesn't actually have a cause and doesn't have a reason. It's part of our biology.
Matthew: When something is part of your biology, it means that it is the natural way your body functions. Your eyes or hair are a certain color. That’s your biology. You have allergies or freckles or you’re taller than the other kids in your class. That’s your biology.
Ross: So if people in your family have anxiety, you are more likely to develop anxiety, much like if people in your family all have brown eyes, you are more likely to have Brown eyes, or if people in your family all have curly hair, you're more likely to have curly hair. But it doesn't mean you definitely will.
You could be born into a family where a lot of people have anxiety and not develop it. You could be born into a family where no one has anxiety and develop it. I think sometimes we get so caught up on like, where does it come from that we forget to address it when we're actually feeling it. And we get so lost in it, like, well, “Why and how and when”, instead of being like, “Okay. It's here.” Then, “what do we do about it?”
Matthew: Understanding ourselves better is a big part of this show. That might be understanding how or why we feel things we do, understanding what we notice going on in the world, or understanding how our bodies work. This next bit is about your body and it is awesome.
Ross: All of our emotions and behaviors in life have pathways in our brains. So when we learn how to play a sport, when we learn how to play an instrument, when we learn how to walk, when we learn how to run, when we learn how to do all the things that we kind of love to do as kids, we're actually creating pathways in our brain for those kinds of behaviors.
We also have pathways in our brain for anxiety. And so it doesn't necessarily matter where it comes from once it's there, the more you experience anxiety, the deeper that pathway in your brain gets. And so to actually change it, you have to develop different coping skills and different ways to talk about it and different ways to manage it or you just keep using that same pathway in your brain and it makes your anxiety bigger and bigger and bigger.
Matthew: When we return, Ross talks about managing anxiety and answers a question submitted by a listener - right after this quick break.
[BREAK]
Matthew: Welcome back to A Kids Book About: The Podcast. On today’s episode we’re talking about anxiety with Ross Szabo.
Ross: I started speaking about my experience with mental health as a senior in high school, and, spoke all over the country and created an organization and wrote a book called Behind Happy Faces.
And then, through my speaking, A Kids Book About found me and asked me if I wanted to write a book about anxiety. And I just thought it was a really amazing opportunity to start the process of helping kids talk about an issue that we just don't talk about or learn about and find a way to take that education to an even younger age where, when people are first developing these pathways in their brain and going through a lot of changes, wouldn't it be great to have a book to read that talks about how you can address anxiety.
Matthew: As you’re listening, if you haven’t already, I want to ask you to think about how it feels to think about people who are managing anxiety.
Today the voices on our show, with the exception of my voice, are all people who manage anxiety in their daily lives. So I asked them how managing or thinking about their anxiety makes them feel.
Owen: Really bad because anxiety’s a bad thing. You shouldn’t like anxiety because it’s bad for you.
Kai: Anxiety can really be, like, anxious. Like, it’s very crazy. And I don’t really know how to talk about it, but I just don’t recommend you ever try to get anxiety.
Parent: But have you had it sometimes?
Kai: Yes. Anxiety comes to me a lot of times.
Sometimes it comes in school. Sometimes it doesn’t. It’s a little off and on.
Ross: Well, it's, it's taken me a while to not let thinking about anxiety make me feel more anxiety. There's some tricks there where like, when you first hear. How about anxiety or think about other people having anxiety, you tend to freak out even more. It's taken me some time to like, think about anxiety and separate myself and put boundaries up and understand like, “Okay, that person can have anxiety. This other person can be nervous, but I don't need to also have those things or also feel those ways.”
So when I hear that other people have anxiety, I try to kind of focus on what that is for them and try and not let it affect me.
[LISTENER QUESTION]
Matthew: Today, our listener question comes from Owen in Maryland.
Owen: A question I have is, what are… I just don’t understand what causes it, cause sometimes I know what causes it, but most of the time I don’t know why I’m anxious. I’m just anxious.
Ross: That is such a great question, Owen. And I think a lot of people feel the same way you do where they start feeling anxiety and they don't know where it comes from and they don't know why.
To the people who do know where anxiety comes from, it's a benefit they can say, like, I know that this causes me, anxiety, heights, spiders, whatever it is. Right. And that's a benefit because they can prepare.
For people like us who don't know and didn't know, that's where we really do have to start paying attention to what is happening in our body and how can we slow it down as soon as we recognize it.
Part of the reason anxiety is so difficult to manage is because sometimes we recognize anxiety so late that all we can do is have that panic attack or that breakdown because we just didn't see it coming. And now we're in it and it's out of control. And all we can do is kind of ride that storm until it ends. But as you get older, what you can hopefully do is start recognizing just the smallest kind of signs and signals. That you're having anxiety and start putting those coping mechanisms into place to slow it down.
Matthew: If you manage anxiety, you may already have a set of coping skills that work well for you. If not, I hope what Ross said next can help you find those coping skills that will work best for you.
Ross: I think everyone's goal with anxiety should be to get better at recognizing it when it happens and finding ways to address it. There will be some people who get so good at it that it doesn't affect them in the same way as it did when they were younger and, and everyone's journey in doing that takes a different amount of time.
So like for me, I didn't always have a cause for my anxiety.
There were times where I would just be sitting in school. And start to feel like I couldn't breathe and start to feel like the walls are caving in and it didn't actually have a cause. And so the first step for me was really just being able to understand like, “Oh, this is that thing. This is that feeling.” And then finding ways to try and slow it down.
So some things that I would do is I would focus on like one part of my desk so that I was just looking at one thing instead of taking in. Everything that was happening.
Another thing I would do is breathe slowly. When anxiety would hit me and it felt like I couldn't breathe. I wanted to slow down and take slower breaths to get oxygen into my brain and body and help calm the part of my brain that is tied to anxiety.
Talking about, uh, what was happening to me was a really good coping mechanism to try and identify what's happening and slow it down.
You know, there are a lot of other coping skills, but I think those three are three good ones to kind of focus in on.
Matthew: No matter how you’re feeling, I’m on your side. Ross is on your side. There are grownups that care about you and are on your side. And your friends… they’re definitely on your side, too.
Ross: I hope that you know, that it's okay to not be okay. It's okay to have all of the emotions that you feel. And the earlier that you start talking about them and doing things to address them or work on them, the better it can make your elementary school, your middle school, your high school experience.
So I hope that when you read the book, you realize you're not alone. There are a lot of other people like you. And the more we talk about this, the better we will get with all of them.
[CLOSING]
Matthew: Thank you to Ross Szabo, author of A Kids Book About Anxiety, for joining us today. And thanks to our very special kid voices for helping make this episode what it is.
Kai: Hi. My name is Kai. I am 8 years old. And I live in Montreal. My favorite thing is a book series called Wings of Fire, the graphic novel series. A very good book series and I recommend you check them out.
Owen: Hello. My name is Owen and I am 9 years old. I’m from Maryland and my favorite things to do are read and draw.
Matthew: Thank you, Kai and Owen! If you want to be on a future episode of A Kids Book About: The Podcast or if you have a question you’d like us to consider, have a grownup email us at listen@akidspodcastabout.com and we’ll send you the details.
A Kids Book About: the Podcast is written, edited, and produced by me, Matthew Winner, with help from Chad Michael Snavely and the team at Sound On Studios. Our executive producer is Jelani Memory. And this show was brought to you by A Kids Podcast About.
Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever podcasts are found, and if you liked this episode, consider sharing it with a friend, teacher, or grownup.
Join us next week for a conversation about Shame with A Kids Book About author Jamie Latourneau.