A woman from Douglas has designed a course to help children identify and deal with anxiety.

Gemma Sharp’s six-week ‘Mind Wizards’ course focuses on outlining to children and parents how to ‘cope with anxiety, increase confidence and manage big emotions’.

She is currently holding sessions in a primary school and has designed an online course which is tailored more to parents.

Mrs Sharp was motivated to create it after she found out she had anxiety herself and it was in her family.

The 47-year-old said: ‘I have had anxiety my whole life, but didn’t really realise and coped with it as best I could. Then, when I started to see it coming out in my family, I was at a loss to know what to do.

‘For the past three years, I’ve being learning about anxiety and the different ways that children behave and how it shows up in their body, how it affects them, how it affects their behaviour, and how we mistake sometimes bad behaviour for what could be anxiety.

‘So, I’ve gone to a year-long coaching programme on how to design a course and how to put it all together.’

She felt many people are too quick to think they ‘need to get rid of it’ as soon as anxiety is diagnosed.

‘In actual fact, we have to have anxiety, it’s hardwired into our body, it has to be there and it keeps us safe,’ Mrs Sharp said. ‘But when it controls our life, that’s when it becomes a problem.

‘There’s an anxiety equation, which is anxiety equals uncertainty, plus an underestimation of our coping skills.

‘If you think about what’s going on in the world at the moment, with Covid and Ukraine and everything, that uncertainty, we can’t sort it.

‘So we need to look at the other part of the equation, which is underestimating how we can cope with things that we need to increase the coping skills and that’s what my course is designed to do – it’s designed to make your coping skills bigger than your anxiety so that it feels smaller.’

The course leader explained that ingraining skills on how to manage it in children early should then become second nature and help alleviate anxiety into adulthood.

‘One of the reasons why I had the parents come was because they learned to help the children to build that muscle,’ she added. ‘But it’s such a benefit for children going into high school if they have techniques to learn how to calm themselves down and what to do when they start to feel worried and anxious.

‘They’ve got that toolkit inside of them to reach in and pull out whatever they need to help them overcome whatever situation they’re in.’

When asked if she felt there wasn’t enough awareness of anxiety, she said that it had become increasingly better identified.

She said: ‘I think that anxiety has become such a hot topic which helps in a way because people are more aware of it but it wasn’t when I was growing up with it.

‘One father said to me recently that every family would benefit from knowing these techniques.’

The next Mind Wizards course will commence on April 30.

Mrs Sharp can be contacted via Facebook on the Hummingbird Parenting Lounge group, which she runs and posts weekly videos on parenting techniques.