Anxiety
Understanding Your Teens Nervous System
When it comes to anxiety, your body has two key systems that control how you react to stress:
✅ The Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) – The body’s gas pedal, triggering the fight-or-flight response.
✅ The Parasympathetic Nervous System (PNS) – The body’s brake, helping you return to calm.
How These Systems Work
🔹 The SNS (Gas Pedal) – Fight or Flight
When your brain detects a threat—real or perceived, it hits the accelerator, flooding the body with stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol.
This increases heart rate, breathing, muscle tension, and alertness—preparing you to react.
While essential for real danger, an overactive SNS can make everyday stressors (like exams, social situations, or uncertainty) feel like emergencies.
🔹 The PNS (Brake) – Rest & Digest
Designed to bring the body back to calm after stress.
Slows heart rate, deepens breathing, relaxes muscles, and signals safety to the brain.
When working properly, the SNS and PNS balance each other out—but in anxiety, the SNS often stays switched on too long, making it harder to return to calm.
Why This Matters
Teaching your teen how to activate the PNS is a game-changer for managing anxiety. Simple techniques like slow breathing, grounding exercises, and movement can interrupt the stress response and help them regain control. The goal isn’t to eliminate stress—it’s to train the brain and body to regulate it more effectively, so anxiety no longer runs the show.
Download Section:
Activating the Calm System Guide – Practical ways to switch on the PNS and ease anxiety.
Step-by-Step Breathing & Grounding Techniques – Simple exercises to help your teen regulate stress in the moment.
▶️ Click play and learn how to help your teen find calm when anxiety takes over.
