Lisa Damour, Ph.D., Speaks to Faculty and Staff About Managing Student Anxiety

8/24/2021

On Thursday, Aug. 19, St. Stephen’s welcomed Lisa Damour, Ph.D., an internationally recognized expert in the fields of adolescent development and psychology. In her talk, “Understanding Emotion, Finding Equilibrium and Caring for Students,” Damour shared with faculty and staff a number of strategies to help kids appropriately express and contain anxiety to achieve mental clarity.

“Maintaining equilibrium is not about getting to a place that feels good,” she said. “It’s about having the right feelings at the right time and managing those emotions effectively.”

“Anxiety is a normal and healthy emotion if you’re in a dangerous situation,” she added, referencing the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as a situation that causes people stress and anxiety. “It’s appropriate to feel negative about the pandemic; that feeling makes sense in the moment.

“There are really only two conditions where anxiety becomes pathological: when there’s no real problem or threat, and when the ‘ringing of the alarm’ is too great,” she said.

Damour explained that effective emotion management involves finding a balance between expressing and containing your feelings. “Verbalization is a key form of expression,” she said. “By sharing emotion, you actually deplete its intensity, which creates the condition that allows the listener to offer empathy and understand.”

Damour noted that many adolescents express emotions through actions, such as crying, listening to music, and running or dancing. “One way we can advance their expression is by helping kids find precise words to describe what they are feeling,” she advised. “Be a useful thesaurus to help them more powerfully capture their exact emotion. Help them drill down through language to find their precise feeling.

“Two strategies to help kids verbalize their anxiety is to start a conversation with them when you’re in the car, but only a few minutes from home so they know they won’t be trapped in a long conversation,” she said. “Breathing is also powerful. When the brain detects a threat, it rings the alarm and sets off the fight or flight response. You can override this by breathing deeply, which shuts down the anxiety alarm.”

To contain emotions, however, Damour believes diversion is key. “The number one form of distraction for teens is watching online videos like TikTok for 15 minutes,” she said, adding that video games are another activity that helps reduce anxiety. In contrast, adults typically find things they can organize as a way to achieve mental clarity.

“Negative forces are mental clutter — like you have 40 tabs open in your brain and are trying to process too much at once,” she explained. “It’s tedious and exhausting.

“I stumbled across a great solution for this: the idea of soft fascination, which requires only a partial use of our bandwidth,” she said. “Soft fascination doesn’t require much concentration, like washing the dishes or working in the garden. It enables you to get mental clarity and work through issues.”

Damour recommended protecting soft fascination opportunities when you can, as they are vital to maintaining good mental health. She suggested leaving your phone at home when you take walks and driving in silence rather than listening to the radio or to podcasts.

Before ending her talk, she shared one final thought with participants: “The presence of the negative doesn’t mean the absence of the positive. If you want to overcome feelings of despair, focus on what you are grateful for. Gratitude can be a source of comfort. Gratitude works.”

In the following weeks of school, Damour also will speak with St. Stephen’s parents and students. Her presentations were made possible by generous support of the Brooke Howe Laws Endowed Lecture Series. The endowment supports an annual guest lecturer on students’ social and emotional health. To learn more about supporting St. Stephen’s through this or another named endowment, please contact Director of Advancement April Speck-Ewer at aspeckewer@sstx.org.

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