Let me introduce you to three distinct voices that can intensify a child’s anxiety unnecessarily. However, these voices might also be familiar to you.

One of these voices is the anxious voice that resides within your mind. It can sometimes create a few complications when you’re feeling anxious. Now, let me shed light on three different manifestations of this anxious voice and, most importantly, how you can regain control over it.

The first voice I’ll refer to is the panic voice. What sets this voice apart is that it not only expresses panicky thoughts but also has a unique quality to it. Imagine if you could place a device in your ear to listen to your thoughts, similar to the stethoscopes doctors use to hear heartbeats. If you were to listen to the panic voice, you would notice its tone is filled with panic. It speaks rapidly, with a higher pitch, barely taking a breath or pausing. It rushes through its words, growing more and more panicked with each passing moment. It’s almost reminiscent of a horse racing commentator, describing the speed and position of the horses.

When we come face to face with our anxious voice, our goal is to regain control over it. There are several ways to achieve this. Firstly, we can question the validity of the statements it makes. It’s possible that some of the things it says are not entirely accurate. Perhaps the ideas and thoughts it presents are too generalized. In such cases, we can challenge it by acknowledging that not every situation leads to anxiety. We can remind ourselves of past experiences where we successfully dealt with similar situations without panicking. By doing so, we can prove to our anxious voice that it is mistaken.

Imagine if we could separate our anxious voice from ourselves and treat it as a separate entity. While it continues to bombard us with panic-inducing thoughts, we would have a strategy to calm it down instead of fueling its anxiety. For instance, if it starts spiralling into thoughts of everything going wrong, we can counter it by acknowledging that things could also turn out fine. We can take a moment to regain composure and assess the situation objectively. There’s no need to let panic consume us so quickly.

By viewing our anxious voice as something separate from ourselves, it becomes easier to determine how we should respond to it. This is the same approach we should adopt when it’s wreaking havoc inside our heads. Anxious voice number two, just like any other anxious voice, needs to be addressed with the same level-headedness.

The tormenting voice, the second anxious voice, is pure agony. It’s the voice that resides within you, constantly bullying and belittling you. It swiftly extinguishes any hope you had of improving yourself, leaving you feeling defeated. It whispers things like, “Don’t even bother trying, you’ll just fail anyway. And then you’ll feel like a complete failure.” That’s how the tormenting voice operates. Occasionally, for some people, it may momentarily ignite a spark of motivation, making them think, “Wait a minute, I can prove it wrong!” However, in reality, it rarely works. Especially if you’ve been subjected to it for a long time or if it has been particularly harsh. You’ve endured it far too often and have been incredibly unkind to yourself using that tormenting voice. So, when it comes to dealing with this tormenting voice, we have a slightly different approach compared to the panic voice. With the panic voice, it was all about disproving it and calming it down. However, with the tormenting voice, disproving it can still be an effective strategy. Reflect on the times when the tormenting voice has been mistaken and prove to yourself that you excel in countless other ways. But the most empowering thing you can do for the tormenting voice is to stand up to it. Give yourself permission to tell that tormenting voice to shut up, to be bold and assertive in your response. You can use this approach specifically with the tormenting voice because, let’s face it, it’s just plain nasty.

Let’s talk about the third anxiety voice, which I like to call the incredible sulk. This voice has a knack for saying things like, “Who cares? Why bother? Nobody loves or cares about you anyway. Just shut up.” It’s like having a sulky teenager inside your head, and it can really bring you down and make you feel worse about your situation. But here’s the thing, we can’t let this voice overpower us. We need to fight fire with fire. When the incredible sulk starts being nasty, we need to stand up to it and tell it that we’re not listening to its nonsense. We need to shut it down and show it who’s boss. So, let’s not let the incredible sulk get the best of us.

What do we do when faced with an incredible sulk? The response you should have in your mind will be slightly different from your panicked voice. Our goal is to calm it down and prove it wrong. It will be different from dealing with the tormentor, where we need to be assertive and a little feisty. The right response for the incredible sulk might be a combination of the other two approaches. There’s a period of time when being kind and soothing to yourself might work. So initially, try saying, “Come on now. There’s no need to be like that. Chin up, shoulders back. Let’s face the world and the day ahead. You’ve got this.”

But if that doesn’t work, then you’ll need to take a stronger approach. We might use a similar method to dealing with the tormentor, something more forceful and assertive, telling it exactly where we want it to go. The difference here is that we don’t need to be mean to the incredible sulk because it’s actually a state of sadness. It’s not tormenting or being cruel to you, not as aggressively as the tormentor. But it still needs to be addressed: “That’s enough. We’re not going to continue like this for the rest of the day. That’s enough.” You can still be firm with it, but the focus is more on giving it instructions on how to behave differently, rather than simply telling it to shut up and go away.

So those are your three different anxiety voices that live inside a child’s head, Panic, Tormentor and the Incredible Sulk and some ways in which you can deal with all three of them.

By Gemma Bailey
www.NLP4Kids.org/gemma-bailey