Anxiety and a teen who isn’t helping 😞

[Sleepybanana]

Hi all

firstly I’ve never been diagnosed with anything MH related. I have a high stress job and a very busy life and over the last few months my anxiety has been almost crippling at times. I’m overwhelmed and worrying about everything to the point where I’m losing sleep and very stressed.

when my kids were young I was also anxious but able to overcome this through a range of different strategies/ wee rituals that I self developed, however how I have two teens and they are not cooperating and I’m struggling with what to do.

an example - we live in an old cold house with crap heating. We use heaters and a fire for heat mainly. One thing I’m always worrying about it is burning down at night and us all dying. Easy solution right - turn off everything before bed and have a safety exit plan blah blah blah. logically I get it. However second teen refuses to turn off her heater at night as she’s cold, leading to me being up half the night worrying about it l. Even though she uses it safely (away from clothes or bedding etc) I just can’t switch off. It’s almost the lack of being able to control the situation (if I turn it off she will make wait until I go to bed and turn it on again) that makes it so bad.
This is just one example of many. I am just worrying about it everything 😞 what do I do to help with this?

I think if realistically the heater is safe then you need to focus on yourself rather than the trigger if that makes sense?

Get to the GP and see if they can help. Also there are a lot of resources online that could maybe help?

It's important you don't pass on irrational anxieties to your kids so use that as motivation. It's what I do even though it's sometimes really tough. Really tough.

As a mother of teens myself I know how tricky they can be and whilst we need them to be respectful etc it's important to remember they are their own person and that sometimes they'll be selfish or silly or unreasonable and that's normal.

If your teen turned the heater off, your anxiety would probably find something else to latch on to. You need to work on growing your window of tolerance for things you can't control, not gaining greater control over others.

You can't blame people for your issues, the heater should be off because of safety but the answer is to you seek help for your issues not the other way around

On a practical note, have you got smoke alarms and do you test them regularly? I would put one in each bedroom and on the landing. One of my dc decided to make pasta one night then fell asleep. Fortunately the smoke alarm woke everyone. I found that reassuring.