Fear starts in the amigdala. A small part of the brain that when excited, exerts total control over the brain. When the amygdala is in control learning cannot happen. The amygdala signals everything in the brain and body that is not necessary to survival to shut off. A child is not going to learn a thing in this state. Yet a struggling child is very often in this state. And pushing on just makes it worse. You'll see it displayed in all sorts of behaviors from just shutting down to tantrums.
There are various ways to calm the amygdala, using techniques that move our brain from "fight or flight" to the sympathetic "rest and digest".
Basically, the amygdala monitors our body, and we can use our body to send a signal to the amygdala that everything is okay. When this happens, the amygdala will allow other parts of our body that we cannot directly control to go back into rest and digest mode. Here are two ways to do that:
Tip #1 - Breathing Techniques
Breathing is an easy and fast fix when it comes to calming both your brain and body.
Practicing the following breathing techniques ahead of time it can quickly tell our amygdala to go back to sleep. When we get stressed, part of our fight or flight response is that our breathing becomes shallow, and the tension causes us to breathe using only the chest.
Luckily, we can counter this with deep breathing. Most experts suggest belly breathing, but if possible, diaphragm breathing is even better. While it does take more practice, diaphragm breathing involves breathing deeply with abdominal muscles engaged, pushing the breath into the lower back. When the diaphragm moves, it gently massages the lower organs, increasing circulation. In fact, in Chinese medicine, the lack of diaphragm breathing is said to be one of the major causes of aging and diminishing brain function, due to a constant starving of oxygen.
Again, this method takes practice -- if you don't already commonly breathe with the diaphragm, then your the lower back muscles can get very sore if you start off with more than 30 seconds or so of practice.
Tip #2 - Changing Posture
Another way of signaling our amygdala is through how we hold our posture and move our body. With teens, you may need to prove this to them -- and there's an easy way to do so!
1) Have your child slump their shoulders, drop their head, and trudge around the room. Do the "mopey teenager" walk for a full minute.
2) Stop and ask your child how they feel. Get them to think about their emotions. Talk about it for a moment so they really become aware.
3) Now have them pull their shoulders back, head pulled back, with their chin very slightly down. Have them walk for one minute like they have somewhere very important to go, like they're proudly-but-quickly walking to an event to be honored for doing a great deed. Make sure to focus on the calf muscles pushing forward.
4) Stop and again talk about how they feel. The results should be very obvious!
Now, your child can see the profound effect posture and movement can have on emotion, and will likely take the effort to develop this as a skill.