From Inside Out 2: Five Tips on Managing Back-to-School Anxiety

Whether you’re a sixth grader, college student, school administrator, or family member of one of the above, you’re likely busy preparing for the upcoming school year. Sometimes, your anxiety can become more active as that first day comes closer. You may find yourself anticipating what could go wrong, being more reactive with your family than usual, or losing sight of the things that normally give you joy.

If you’ve seen Pixar’s Inside Out 2 this summer, you likely remember the surprising new character—Anxiety. Inside Out 2 follows Rylie’s transition from middle school to high school through the lens of her internal family. An internal family is made up of the different emotions each of us carry inside of us. In Rylie’s case, this includes emotions like joy, sadness, disgust, fear, envy, embarrassment, and anxiety. Rylie struggles to direct her life with all of these competing emotions, instead feeling like emotions such as anxiety are directing her.

Rylie’s experience managing her anxiety in Inside Out 2 can help you navigate your own back-to-school anxiety in several ways.

1.     Understanding anxiety’s role in your life can help you keep it in perspective.

Inside Out 2 reminds us that all of our emotions have a job, and at their best they are working to keep us safe and moving towards our goals and values. When Anxiety comes on the scene, it tells Joy, “We all have a job to do. You make Riley happy. Sadness makes her sad. Fear protects her from the scary stuff she can see, and my job is to protect her from the scary stuff she can’t see. I plan for the future.”

While fear usually stems from real-life events, anxiety floats on the wings of your imagination, envisioning the worst-case scenarios. At its best, it might help you envision outcomes you don’t want and direct your course towards the outcomes you do want. At its worst, it can drain your mental energy and fill you with a sense of dread for the future. You might notice your body becoming tense, bracing for events that exist only in your imagination.

When you’re aware that anxiety is keeping a running list of catastrophes that haven’t happened yet and in many cases will never happen, you can keep yourself grounded in the present. One way to do this is to ask yourself, is this thing I’m worrying about something I definitely need to prepare for, or is this my imagination working overtime right now? Keep to figure out how you can challenge those negative thoughts rooted in your imagination.

2.     You don’t have to buy into anxiety’s “what if” statements— let joy stand up to them.

In a particularly memorable scene, Anxiety has dozens of artists drawing scenes of everything that could go wrong at Rylie’s hockey camp. Rylie can’t sleep with all of these nightmarish scenes filling her imagination. The worry “What if I mess up?” keeps her awake half of the night.

Joy interrupts the process, and flips the “what if” questions on their head. “What if you do great? What if you make friends? What if everything is ok?” With those reassuring thoughts, Rylie falls back asleep.

You can follow Joy’s lead! When Anxiety is taking over your imagination about how back-to-school will go, try inviting Joy to the table, too. Flip your negative what if statements into positive what if statements, and notice how making room for the positive impacts your wellbeing. Anxiety’s threat “What if I can’t make friends this year?” becomes joy’s invitation of “What if having to make new friends at a new school helps me learn to be a better friend?” The image of yourself dropping your lunch tray in front of everyone dissolves into an image of you laughing at lunch with your friends.

If you’re struggling to flip Anxiety “What ifs” into Joy “What ifs” on your own, our counselors at The Counseling Collective would be happy to work with you to help decrease your anxiety and improve your mood.

3.     Bottling up your emotions actually leads to losing touch with yourself.

As Inside Out 2 goes on, Anxiety begins to crowd out Joy, literally bottling her up in a glass jar with some other unwanted emotions. The emotions exclaim, “We’re suppressed emotions!”

Locking your emotions up or ignoring them can feel like the safest option at times, especially when your emotions feel overwhelming. However, suppressing emotion can actually cause you to lose touch with yourself and your needs. You think you’re managing your emotions, but actually, the pressure might just build up until it explodes, and then the emotions will be managing you. In suppressing your emotions, you may actually be losing the choice about how you want to process or express them.

Instead of suppressing your emotions, validating them can help defuse tension. A statement such as, “It makes sense that I’m feeling nervous, it’s my first day of college!” can replace suppression with self-compassion. Emotional validation can help you create space for your emotions so that you stay in touch with yourself and your needs and values. In section four, we’ll look at how you can tolerate emotions that feel overwhelming.

4.     Making space for multiple emotions can promote emotional health and stability.

Over the course of the film, both Anxiety and Joy learn that they “don’t get to choose who Riley is.” No one single emotion gets to define her, or you! That’s good news, because it means that as emotions ebb and flow, you can remain stable. When you make space for multiple emotions at once, you can prevent one strong emotion from overwhelming you.

One way to practice this is by sharing highs and lows with a family member, friend, or in a journal each day. You may find that your brain is naturally more biased towards positive or negative emotions. By making space to acknowledge the breadth of your experience each day rather than suppressing or ignoring one aspect of your experience, you can experience more resilience and emotional stability. You are able to emotionally regulate- a term that means you can name, validate, and tend to your emotions rather than letting your emotions manage you.

5.     Emotions are contagious, so managing your anxiety may help those around you manage their anxiety as well.

You probably can think of a time when someone else’s anxiety rubbed off on you. Emotions like anxiety can be really contagious, whether you’re at soccer tryouts, your first day of teaching, or sending your baby off to kindergarten.

In Inside Out 2, we watch as Rylie’s internal family of emotions interacts with her parent’s internal family of emotions. When Rylie begins to escalate into anxiety on the morning of hockey camp, her mom stays calm, preventing the situation from escalating. When you can manage your anxiety effectively, you can help co-regulate those around you. That means that the positive ways that you’re managing your own anxiety can have a positive impact on the people around you.

You can support the emotional health of your organization, school, or family by normalizing talking about emotions and ways to manage them. Speaking openly with your children about the ways that you manage anxiety, for example, can help them more effectively manage anxiety in their own lives. Or, if you’re trying out for middle school soccer and you have a friend who’s really anxious, let them know that you feel anxious, too, and share a way that you’re coping with anxiety about tryouts.

You are not responsible for how anyone else handles their anxiety, and the ways that you handle your anxiety can have a positive impact on those around you. 

Inside Out 2 is a powerful reminder that each of your emotions serves a purpose, and you can thrive when each of them is doing its job to support you. Sometimes, particularly in big transitions like back-to-school, your anxiety can get the best of you. If you find that you’re paralyzed by anxiety or having difficulty getting back in touch with your joy, you may find it helpful to work with a counselor here at The Counseling Collective to reduce your anxiety so you can thrive amidst life’s transitions. The mental health therapists at our office also offer counseling for a variety of issues including trauma using EMDR, depression, anxiety, grief, and couples counseling. We work with kids, teens, adults, and couples. We also offer online counseling services which can be great for people with busy schedules or for people who live in parts of Pennsylvania with limited counseling options. You can check out our website to see the full list of counseling services that we offer. Or, Schedule An Appointment here.