Anxiety for Armed Forces Young People

Anxiety Resource | Young people tell us that people don’t understand things like anxiety and that people tell them ‘it’s overworrying but that’s not it’.

Young people can experience higher anxiety during deployment because they are worrying about whether their parent or carer is safe, how much of their home life they can share and when their parent will next be in contact. Worries for young people also include being distracted and not remembering if they have sent messages or conveyed the right information when they do have calls. This panic over what to tell parents tends to be because there are so many things happening for the young person, or that they don’t want to upset their parent while they are deployed.

Young people describe the impact anxiety has on them in lots of ways:

There are also sensitive anxieties around both the serving parent/carer and the parent/carer who is at home. For example:

It’s common for these anxieties to significantly disrupt young people’s ability to engage in education, their routines and sense of comfort at home, as well as their behaviour with friends and family. This can promote feelings of isolation, as one young person explains – “I’ll be honest, I can overreact, I did snap but didn’t mean to and you can’t groan to the other parent”.

So how do we manage anxiety?

Our article ‘What is anxiety’ explains why we have anxiety, what’s going on in our bodies when we experience anxiety and we have some additional resources on helpful ways to manage this. We also have some top tips from young people which you can view below. These activities are very individual so please remember to focus on what works well for you, and try something else if a certain technique is unhelpful. It’s important to keep in mind though, that most things need some practice so stick with it for a while before making up your mind for good.

Top tips from young people: