DD6 has been having frequent bouts of anxiety of late. She has always been an anxious kid, but this newfound bouts of anxiety seems to have started suddenly over the past 2-3 weeks.
During the past 2-3 weeks, her anxiety suddenly seems to have interspersed into her everyday routines - from repeatedly thinking of recurrent thoughts to over-analyzing all the infinite permutations of everyday tasks to existential concerns. She tells me "My brain keeps telling me that people are stupid."
During this time she also opened up saying "I don't like school. I like going to school, but I don't like it after classes start." When gently prodded she explained "I want to do math, I don't want to just watch the teacher do stuff on the board. The work I do is boring."
Also, during this same time, another kid in her 1st Grade class used the F word while with DD. This went up to the teacher who has spoken to that kid's parent to ensure this never repeats. But now DD is exposed to the word and has realized that it's a word not to be thought about or spoken aloud. Now she has become obsessed with it saying "My brain keeps thinking about the word. I cannot take it out of my mind. I'm feeling bad for no reason."
She seems worried about it and is overthinking on why she's unable to remove that word from her mind. We told her "It's ok if the word remains in your mind. It may not be possible to just remove it from your thoughts. And that's perfectly normal. But just ensure you don't use the word while talking to anyone, that's it. Just having the word in your mind is perfectly ok". That seemed to have calmed her a bit, knowing that she doesn't need to necessarily "erase" that word from her thoughts. But she still appears to be more worried than usual.
Any inputs on how we can help her calm her thoughts down?
