Inside The Growing Brain

Mental health can be a scary and unsettling topic to talk about, especially when you aren’t too sure about what it could be causing you to feel the way you are. And that’s okay, but seeking help when you can tell that something is off is very important. 

As a teen struggling with mental health myself, I understand the feeling of not knowing how to seek help, or if I’m doing the right thing by asking for help. But trust me, asking for help is normally the best way to go about it. As we teens grow into adults, we are destined to face challenges and difficulties, and these can come from a variety of sources. Not everyone has the same story; we all face different challenges to shape us into the people we are today. 

Here at OM, we have a variety of resources to make sure we are the best version of ourselves that we can be. We have six amazing guidance counselors, along with our awesome school psychologist, Ms. Knauss. I got the pleasure of speaking with Ms. Knauss, whom you may know. Her role at our school is to help students with mental health disorders and many other social-emotional learning needs. This ranges from anxiety to depression, and includes students with learning difficulties. Ms. Knauss primarily works with students with anxiety and depression, and she teaches them different coping mechanisms that can be used during school to help these students operate with these disorders, such as what to do if they’re in a panic attack. She guides students and teaches them how to calm down in stressful situations that would cause a panic attack. With work, take those thoughts that cause those reactions, and try to change that thought into a different thought, so you can change how you react to the thought if it pops up again. Knauss states that it is tricky to find ways to cope with mental health problems in a school setting. Strictly because we, as students, have to be in class. And it’s even hard for her to pull students to meet with her during the school day, as she doesn’t want to disrupt their learning. She also shares that “Anxiety is huge… and it’s gotten worse over the years. The academic demands and expectations have increased. A lot of it is from internal pressure from themselves… That can be hard on your mental health.” She also mentioned to me that a lot more people have anxiety than you think so you are not alone, and it’s a normalized thing.

However, being a student with anxiety, it isn’t as simple as one could try and imagine. Facing anxiety, depending on the type of anxiety, and severity level, in school specifically, can be very difficult. Anxiety is a chemical imbalance in your brain. You experience anxiety symptoms when too much serotonin, dopamine, and other chemicals are being released. All of these chemicals cause your body to go into a fight-or-flight mode. And you can feel symptoms such as: racing heart rate, nausea, a shivery feeling, dizziness, and many more symptoms. 

There are many different ways to navigate the world with anxiety and other mental health disorders. But finding what works best for you takes time, and it isn’t an easy journey. Many people find grounding techniques such as deep breathing exercises, listening to music, or maybe even finding a topic in your brain that you enjoy, for example, take the category movies, find your favorite one, or one you enjoy, and list all of your favorite characters from A-Z. Things like this that get your mind off the thought causing your worry. It can be very helpful to some people. While other cases can be more severe, where these kinds of exercises don’t work as well, and there is medication that people use to help keep their minds at a stable rate, so they can function a little more easily. Taking medication to help keep your mind stable is completely okay and is nothing to be ashamed of. 

I had a huge takeaway from my time talking to Ms. Knauss: you never know what your classmates are going through, so being nice to everyone is extremely important. You never know what someone is battling mentally, and one wrong thing said, or done, could trigger a load of emotions, you from the outside would not have thought could or would happen.