Episode 17: High Anxiety

Uncertainty might create a sense of discomfort in most people. For many students, however, uncertainties are creating an anxiety loop that feeds on itself. In this episode, Abounding Circles founder Sarah Snyder (LCSW) shares why students today have more and more uncertainty in their daily lives (Covid, social media, bullying) and how it leads kids to live in a constant state of alert. Sarah shares how things like coaching, wellness circles, and even yoga can help keep students grounded and their nervous systems calmer. 2

Connect with Sarah on LinkedIn: Sarah Snyder's Profile 

To learn more about Abounding Circles, visit https://www.aboundingcircles.com/

Transcript

Announcer:

You're listening to the Voices In Education Podcast powered by Securly, where we hear from new voices and explore new ideas about how we can reimagine education to support whole student success. Education is at an inflection point. As we grapple with complex challenges like funding and enrollment, as well as diversity, equity, and safety, we also have an opportunity, an opportunity to reimagine education. Now more than ever, we know the importance that students’ overall wellbeing plays in their success. They need to feel supported and safe and connected to be able to engage in their learning and achieve their full potential. Join your host, Casey Agena, a former teacher turned instructional coach and technologist, as he interviews inspirational educators, school leaders, wellness professionals, and more to amplify their voices. You'll learn about the innovative work they're doing to support student safety, engagement, and overall wellness. And who knows, you may even spark a new idea of your own. Ready to reimagine education? Let's go.

Casey:

In today's episode, I’m here talking with my friend and colleague Sarah Snyder, who provides a perspective on mental health and wellness as a counselor and consultant with schools and organizations, really focusing on the mental health and wellness of girls and young women. Now, while most of the conversation is focused on girls, we will address SEL and student wellness for all students, so thank you for joining us today. Welcome, Sarah, and glad to have you here.

Sarah:

Hey, Casey, thanks for having me. Glad to be here.

Casey:

We had some time, pre-show, to talk about mental health issues. So let's just dive right into this, where we shared a little bit about how mental health issues don't discriminate and they cut across age gaps, gender, ethnicities, and in your work with adolescents, particularly with high school age students, this is a very big topic. So tell us about your work, how it's impacted your work, particularly now and on the students themselves, particularly with young women you work with and their families.

Sarah:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, so I think it's important to just start with a little bit about who I am and my background. So like you said, I'm a LCSW, a licensed clinical social worker, licensed therapist, and private practice. But I started out as a high school counselor and psychology teacher for about 12 years. So in that work I was doing a lot of, I want to say I was a little bit like a case manager. I was both a teacher, which was really fun and exciting, as well as I was having students referred to me from their deans or other teachers. My work with those kids really was to make sure that they and their families got the resources that they needed. So I was constantly fielding and making sure, I was not a therapist in that role. I was really serving as a counselor and connecting them with the right resources.

Sarah:

What's been really amazing though about now, my role as a therapist, a licensed therapist here in Hawaii, is that I get to dive deeper. So I actually really get to do the therapeutic work with my clients and invite their families to participate in that. Yes, having the background in yoga, and I use a lot of mindfulness and meditation and those principles of yoga as well as neuro education to help my clients understand what's going on for them when they're experiencing. You're asking how is this impacting students? What I see is that it really... I've just been reading article after article about just the mental health crisis that young people are in right now.

Sarah:

I think we're all experiencing it, but I do think that teens in particular, I don't know about you, there was a recent New York Times article in which I was reading about this and so I think what I see is just levels of anxiety are incredibly high. Rates of depression are high. I think that during the pandemic in particular, there was just so many adjustments happening, so many transitions happening, and they were somewhat cut off from their support network, which is really their friends. They were home, they were doing homeschooling. Let's be honest, us as parents, even we are stressed. We were stressed. So it created the perfect storm for a lot of high school students and younger kids as well. But just the challenge around really not just acknowledging our feelings and feeling just so much uncertainty about the future with Covid, but also I think just not really knowing how is this ever going to end? It's just been layer upon layer.

Casey:

We talk about this heightened awareness from us as professionals in the field and recognizing it. It's not like it never existed before.

Sarah:

Oh, no. For sure.

Casey:

But there's a heightening to it currently, there are factors into that, that it has scaled from three years ago until now.

Sarah:

Yes, absolutely. Mental health issues have been something that I think many kids and teens struggle with and adults. But I think that the pandemic gave people permission to seek help. So that's why there's such a shortage now of therapists, and that's why it's so hard to sometimes access services is because I think that so many more people are giving themselves permission to seek help and get support, and there's just not enough supply for the demand that's happening right now.

Casey:

So with that, what are the avenues of reaching out that students in high schools have, these 14, 15, 16, 17 year olds? We know that always existed in terms of that ratio of counselor to students, and that was always challenging. But now even more with the demand, like you said, it makes it tough. So how are they getting the connection that they need, and sometimes those are also indicators of a cry for help as well.

Sarah:

Yeah, absolutely. So I'll be really honest, I think that what is so important for schools right now is to take a proactive approach to mental health as opposed to a reactive approach to mental health. Meaning that, in order for students to know that there are services available to them, for example, their school counselors, they need to know what those services are. So this is where I think SEL, or social emotional learning comes in. So the more that there's SEL lessons being taught in schools, it gives permission for kids to feel their feelings. It gives permission for adults to feel their feelings too. Teachers need to acknowledge their own challenges, and I think that the more that we talk about... Basically, there's different components I would say, of SEL. There's the self-awareness piece, certainly the social awareness, self-management has been a huge one. I focus a lot on that. I mean, there's also relationship skills and responsible decision making, all are part of this SEL wheel, the castle wheel of Social Emotional Learning.

Sarah:

A lot of what I do is around educating teens and families around self-management, meaning emotional regulation. So helping and teaching people about what does it mean to be emotionally intelligent? What does it look like to regulate our emotions? So the more that we can actually start, even you can teach that so young, you can start that in kindergarten. So you just find age appropriate ways to teach students about, essentially their bodies and how their mind and their body is connected and how there are certain tools that we can give kids at a very young age so that when there are, if there are mental health crisis, they're much more likely to be willing to talk about it, whether it's with their parents or with other teachers or counselors at school.

Casey:

I'm thinking really far back, but when you first got into this field and this work that you're doing, whether it's in the industry itself or whether it's the actual students and their families, what's been the biggest change from when you first got into this field and with counseling and what's been the biggest change from when you first got in until now?

Sarah:

A big change that I see in terms of just systemicly, I think that we are more willing to teach and talk about SEL and to acknowledge the importance of the role. I think that 10 years ago, SEL was just starting to be acknowledged as an important thing to include in kids' education. Now it's just a no brainer, it's a really critical part. I think that what I see among students themselves, the school that I was working at was definitely a competitive school with lots of overachieving students. So a lot of what I saw previously in that role of high school counselor was certainly, there was anxiety, a lot of high anxiety among students because they wanted to do well. So there's a little bit of that perfectionism, and sometimes that can lead to some depressive thinking.

Sarah:

But what I see now, I just think that the anxiety levels are astronomical. I think that there's such a misperception that success is linear or that the path is linear. I do wish we did a better job of helping kids to understand that when they graduate from high school, there are a lot of different paths that they can take. Whether that involves a gap year, or that involves, whatever it is around. I think that the message that a lot of kids get is that they graduate, they go to college, they go to grad school, and then they get a job that makes them successful. If you ask anyone how they got to where they are, it's not that linear. So I think so much of what I do in working with teens, but also I actually see a lot of young adults, I see a lot of college age and post-college age kids or women who are trying to navigate, "What's next?" What does my life look like next?" Especially in this pandemic world, it's been really challenging to know, "What is next?" There's so much uncertainty. So in terms of how is it different, I just think that the amount of uncertainty that a lot of students are facing creates incredibly high anxiety for them.

Casey:

You brought up women and young women, high school, college age. What's been challenging for them? What's challenged by young women in high school and early college, particularly now, and how they cope with mental health. Whether, you pointed out that linear trajectory of where they are and where they want to be, but then also all of those factors around that too. Whether it's their parents, where they're at or their peers, which is real heavy around that, and particularly with young women and where they see themselves now and where they want to be. What's been the piece around that, that's something that we need to address?

Sarah:

I think that another huge difference in terms of then versus now, which also speaks to your question, is social media. I think that kids are growing up, it feels so normal to them to communicate to each other in this digital age of technology where they don't even remember they can pick up the phone to call someone. They're just texting or what they see on social media, they assume is real and normal, and there's a lot of comparison. So that's true for all genders, but I think that in particular, girls and women really struggle with that comparison that they see on social media. There's these very unrealistic standards that I think a lot of girls and women feel like they're supposed to meet, whether it's around beauty or it's around success or whatever, happiness even.

Sarah:

But I think that the messages that girls and women get are not the healthiest through social media or even through the media in general. So a lot of the work that I do, whether it's individual or even groups that I run, it's essentially helping girls and women learn healthier strategies for creating a life that they feel proud of. So it's helping them to reconnect to themselves, reconnect to others, to see, and to hear that it's safe to be vulnerable, emotionally vulnerable, and that actually, that's how we create connection. Social media is just this highlight reel, not everybody is vulnerable through social media. It just creates some really unhealthy expectations about what we're supposed to look like, what we're supposed to act like. So to be honest, that's a huge chunk of my work.

Casey:

You talk about groups, and I know you've done a number of girls’ groups and things like that in the past. In working with young women, one to one versus the group, what's the difference there and why is one more, I wouldn't say more important than the other, just a different context and how that's meaningful for the individual. What is that difference, and why is that group or that girls' group, why is that important?

Sarah:

Yeah, I love group work, honestly, I do. I have been running groups for a decade, at least over a decade. In my experience, one of two things happened when you bring girls and women together, if it's not facilitated safely and well, there is this just competition that gets created or somewhat of a cattiness. If it's facilitated in a way that is safe and feels comfortable, there is just such a sense of connection and sisterhood and the ability to be vulnerable. When we're vulnerable, we make connections, and when we make connections, we feel safe. When we feel safe, we're able to essentially shift our focus to think about, "Who do I want to be in this world?" When we feel emotionally unsafe, we're in survival mode. We can't think at that higher-level frontal lobe, that prefrontal cortex. We can't really think long term because we're just in our sympathetic nervous system. We're in fight or flight, if we don't feel safe. So I think the beauty of circles of girls and women is that it creates a sense of safety, physical safety, but also emotional safety, and all it takes is one girl or one woman who's willing to share from a place of authenticity or vulnerability or truth. That opens the door for other girls to do the same.

Casey:

Yeah, I'm no expert on gender studies or anything like that, but I'm starting to think about having two daughters of my own and a son too, and just thinking about him. Is it even from a gender side, work on a flip side, having boys together to think about, is that similar?

Sarah:

It's so interesting that you say that. I do think that boys groups are fabulous. I don't run those, I don't facilitate those. I do think they’re sometimes better run by someone who is the same gender, just because there's a certain element, again, of safety and understanding that comes from that. I wish that there were more opportunities for boys to have those safe groups. Boys might need a little bit more physicality almost, to being emotionally vulnerable. There does need to be some component that's somewhat physical. I actually think girls need that too, which is why I created my Yoga circle groups ages ago. Basically that combined group counseling and yoga was because I was seeing that actually, giving girls an opportunity to move their bodies, connect to their bodies through the breath that allowed them to build a sense of self esteem, self confidence, self awareness, that was just different than just traditional group therapy.

Casey:

Do adults, and let's talk specifically about teachers and parents who are really the adults connected to students in schools. Do teachers and parents know about this? What we're talking about here? Are they aware of this that we talked a little bit about the history of SEL and mental health and those pieces and those components within the school day, and why support them? Do adults that are part of children's lives understand that, as we said, linear trajectory, and there's multiple ways to get there and there doesn't need to be that added pressure and whatnot. Are we and our colleagues in the industry aware of that? If not, what can schools do to help to make that an issue to address?

Sarah:

Well, I actually think that's such a great question for a lot of reasons. I don't know if you're familiar with the ruler program, and it's basically an emotional intelligence program out of Yale, and it's excellent. I used a lot of that in my work and I know that, essentially, they create a lot of opportunities within schools to create these safe spaces that use SEL. But one of the tenets of the ruler program is that the adults, the faculty in the school actually have to buy in first. They have to practice the tools in order to then be able to teach it to their students. So one of the things I always found that was so interesting is I do believe that educators a hundred percent believe in SEL. Many of us, we see the value of it. We're not always as comfortable practicing it ourselves and so I think that there's a huge benefit to creating safe spaces for educators as well to begin to actually build some of those emotional intelligence skills, if that's not something that they were ever really taught. So I think that that is a huge piece of this, is to make sure that we are practicing what we preach. I have a lot more to say, but yeah.

Casey:

I think even now, and we had talked a little about this pre-show, not only learning it for ourselves as adults to work with our students, but I think we need it too. There's a lot out there about teacher wellness.

Sarah:

100 percent, yes.

Casey:

Having that self-awareness for us so that we can be a positive when we're in the lines of kids. So all of these resources that you shared, I know that we had looked at a place where you've been able to codify a lot of these resources and services that you provide, now getting into this work around abounding circles, tell us a little bit about that and the work that you're doing there.

Sarah:

Yeah, totally. So because of essentially the therapist shortage and the mental health crisis that I think we're in, I have a very long wait list, and I know that a lot of other therapists do too. I just hate having to turn people away. I decided to try to find creative solutions basically to make some of the tools that I teach a little bit more accessible to folks who need it. So that is part of what prompted me to create, basically, I started by creating literally a Facebook group, the Women's Wellness Circle. The goal of that is really just to create a safe virtual space for women to come together and to be able to acknowledge the challenges that we're facing, but also build connection. I share a lot of tools and strategies for stress management and healthy living in there. Through that, though, my goal is not just to have virtual circles, but to have in person women's circles, girls circles, mother daughter circles. I have a lot of visioning that's happening. It's all coming together slowly, but it's actually been really cool. I just finished teaching a eight week course for women in emotional intelligence and emotional regulation, and I can't even tell you. If I could get this out to more people, I would, and I will, and I am, but it's a work in progress.

Casey:

Well, I want to highlight a couple of things that you were able to share with us and our listeners today. We were able to look back at how things were a little bit historically, and now this heightened-ness, and what are we doing about it in K-12 schools. I'm really glad that you have a place that we will share with all of you at aboundingcircles.com, where Sarah's been able to codify and bring all of these pieces together. So Sarah, I want to thank you for your time, lending your voice to Voices In Education.

Sarah:

Absolutely. Thank you so much, Casey. Thanks for having me.

Announcer:

Thanks for tuning in to the Voices In Education Podcast powered by Securly, where we hear from new voices and explore new ideas about how we can reimagine education to support whole student success. If you enjoyed today's episode, we hope you'll consider subscribing to the podcast and sharing it with others who would benefit from listening. Even a small act of support helps us reach more people and make a bigger impact. For the resources from today's episode and additional details about the podcast, please visit www.securly.com/podcast. Until next time, thanks for listening.