How Yoga Can Help Children Manage Anxiety

By now many of us, as adults, are familiar with the symptoms of anxiety. This is probably from our own experiences as we've gone through life and possibly because of a growing awareness about the importance of mental health.

Perhaps less of us are familiar with how anxiety effects children though.

According to The National Children’s Society website “Five children in a class of 30 are likely to have a mental health problem.” And the NHS website states that “The proportion of children experiencing a probable mental disorder has increased over the past three years, from one in nine in 2017 to one in six in July this year (2020).”

There are of course, many different mental illnesses but they often intertwine with one another. While most children will not struggle with severe anxiety, like adults, they will still experience some form of anxiety in their lives. It’s understandable that these numbers have increased over the last year, due to the pandemic, all of us are going through changes and uncertainties. There are other factors such as the pressures caused by social media and the internet, that seem to be used by younger and younger age groups. A more positive factor could be because of the growing awareness of mental health, meaning it is more likely to be identified and hopefully treated.

If you’ve read this far down, you might now be thinking ‘This all sounds bad, why am I reading this!?’ But knowing, is half the battle. We’ve established that mental health and anxiety effects everyone and we probably mostly agree that Yoga, mindfulness and meditation can help manage anxiety, but how can Yoga be accessible and beneficial to children?

At the age of 8 or 9 I started to exhibit OCD tendencies, a symptom of anxiety. This was not the kind of OCD where you must keep everything orderly as is often depicted, but more strange and illogical habits. I don’t even know what triggered me or caused me to be so anxious, I can’t say that I was even fully aware of what was happening to me, to be honest. This is the reason why being aware of anxiety and being able to address it comfortably is so important. It was no fault of my parents, who have always always been supportive, but I think there was a general lack of awareness in society that meant it wasn’t fully addressed or treated. I was fortunate that it didn’t stop me from doing day to day things, but needless to say, not dealing with it did not improve things for me over the years.

At the time I believe I would have greatly benefitted from firstly, understanding what anxiety was and secondly, learning how to manage it. In Yoga these things go hand in hand and are experienced in several ways. 

Firstly and, I believe most importantly, we acknowledge our feelings. Both physically and mentally, we learn how they are connected. Most adults know that stress manifests in our bodies in the form tight shoulders, gritted teeth or sleepless nights, for example. Maybe these are obvious signs of stress to us, but this might be news to a child who doesn’t understand why they’re so tired and can’t concentrate in class.

So, understanding more about anxiety and what it does in your body helps to eliminate the feeling of the unknown. Not knowing what’s happening to you can be a factor in a cycle of stress. Acknowledging that everyone experiences some form of anxiety makes it feel like the load is shared and that it’s ok to have these feelings. Of course, in Yoga, we don’t just talk about how we’re feeling. We learn how to feel things, because we learn best through practice. This is something that I take for granted now, as someone who regularly practices Yoga. Learning this as a child could have helped me so much!

Becoming familiar with how our body feels when we move is what happens when we do Yoga. Young children especially, may not realise that’s what they’re doing at first, but it’s all contributing to the practice of knowing their bodies. And of course, scientifically, movement of the body is known to release endorphins which elevates mood. The stretching poses we do in Yoga releases tension in the muscles and deep breathing triggers the parasympathetic nervous system or ‘rest and digest’ state of being.

When I teach BEAM Yoga classes to children, it is of course different to teaching adults. We do our best to help the children understand why what we’re doing is helping. But the great things is, that even if they don’t fully understand Yoga yet, getting even 30 minutes of feeling calm and having fun is still incredibly beneficial. Just like any basic learning process, the more often you do something, in this case being calm, the stronger those pathways in the brain become and the easier it is to do.

Childhood is when we are most susceptible to forming new patterns of learned behaviour. If children can be taught how to manage their anxious tendencies, it is possible that those anxieties will be become less and less dominant as they grow up into adults. Not to mention helping them in their day to day lives.

Who knows whether or not my anxiety would have been lessened as an adult if I had practiced Yoga when I was a child? I can’t say for sure. I do know that it benefits me now and I am sure that it benefits the children I teach, if only because I see them having so much fun in their Yoga classes.

To conclude:

1. Knowing about anxiety and mental health is half the battle in dealing with it.
2. Understanding how anxiety feels in our bodies makes an abstract concept tangible and therefore more manageable.
3. Moving, breathing and having fun trigger the nervous system into a more relaxed state.
4. The more often our bodies are in this rest and digest (calm) state, the easier it is to get back into that state of being when we feel anxious.

If you're curious about empowering children with yoga - here's a fantastic accredited children's yoga teacher training course to get you started. You can find out more information about the course by clicking here.