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Worrying, Anxiety, and Overthinking
Does relentless anxiousness torment your adolescent daughter? Does she continuously agonize about the future and feel unsure about how her life will play out? Is your child a prisoner of her own psyche? If so, the following article was created to help you and your daughter through this trying time. We at Clearview Girls Academy would like to educate parents of teenage girls with GAD on how they can support their daughter during this arduous time. Below is a quick run-through of how anxiety disorders occur, how they function, and treatment options that leading experts recommend.
Parenting a teenage girl who has a generalized anxiety disorder can be stressful. The very process can even leave parents feeling helpless as they try and fail to cull their daughter's persistent and relentlessly incapacitating thoughts of dread and impending doom.
But parents can find solace by understanding one immutable truth: While generalized anxiety disorder can be traumatic, with adequate therapeutic measures, it is one of the most successfully rehabilitated mental illnesses known to man.
The Overthinking Teenage Mind
While it's true, every teenage girl overthinks things on occasion, the persistent feelings of worry and dread can be conducive to something more serious, namely, what the psychiatric community refers to as, a generalized anxiety disorder.
Teenage girls with generalized anxiety experience waves of creeping thoughts that intrusively and continuously creep into their minds, leaving them psychologically and emotionally battered. People afflicted by GAD are prone to chronic and morose symptomatic worrying that borders on delusional and paranoic. These illogical thoughts are so debilitating that it often leaves those afflicted unable to function in society properly.
The psychiatric community categorizes generalized anxiety into two models: ruminating and worrying.
Ruminating is when a person regularly restates the negativity of their past. These inner monologues may sound something like the following examples:
- "I shouldn't have even raised my hand?!" They all probably view me as a pseudo-intellectual after I spoke my mind at Friday night's party.
- "Why should I even try? I know I'll fail like last time."
- "High school bullies were right when they announced to the whole school that I wouldn't amount to anything; I'll only continue to prove them right."
Cynical thoughts and predictions characterize worrying as to what is growing to happen. This type of inner monologue might sound something to the effect of the following examples:
- "I know I'm going to choke in the softball tournament this Friday! I'm going to let all my teammates down. What if I let the whole town down?!"
- "I'm almost an adult. What if I'm not ready to make it out on my own? Will everyone think of me as a failure if I don't succeed at chasing my lofty dreams?"
- "I hope my friends don't realize that I'm not who they think I am. It's just a matter of time before they discover the real me and dismiss me for someone who is genuinely cool and worth their time."
Compulsive, Negative Overthinking is a Trained and Continuously Performed Mental Task
Compulsive overthinkers don't just use inner thoughts to contemplate and add to their misery. Sometimes, they conjure up images that are much more dreadful and make the impending events in their heads become "real."
For instance, they may envision their vehicle going off the road or replay a disturbing or embarrassing moment in their minds like a movie. When the movie stops, they rewind, replay, pause, stop, rewind, and replay again. It's not long before this fake event becomes just as real as if it were to have already happened.
Their brains tend to overthink everything that holds them back from doing something productive about their concern.
The Dangers Of Overthinking
Thinking too much and too often about worst-case scenarios isn't just an annoyance; it can take a severe toll on a teenage girl's well-being.
Research finds that internalizing shortcomings, mistakes, and obsessing over potential problems increases your risk of long-lasting, severe mental health problems and illnesses.
As adolescent's mental health declines, their perpetuating tendency to ruminate negativity increases, leading to a vicious cycle that is hard to break.
This inability to overcome one's thoughts and constant frustration from failed attempts to get out of their head leads many clinically anxious teenage girls to develop a co-occurring depressive disorder. If not adequately treated, depression can cause a myriad of severe issues.
That said, parents of a teenage girl struggling with anxiety must seek immediate intensive treatment - one that is well-versed in treating teenage mental and behavioral health-related issues.
Professional Help is the Key to Overcoming Generalized Anxiety
Fortunately for misunderstood and obsessively neurotic teenage girls, there are ways to help their daughter overcome daily and hellish routines of self-validating their darkest insecurities due to overthinking - Thus freeing them from their minds.
