Is Halloween giving your child nightmares?
Is Halloween a nightmare waiting to happen?
Halloween can be great fun - we all know that spooky face-painting, elaborate dressing up and spider cupcakes can make kids laugh. But for some, the scary costumes and images can trigger off episodes of anxiety that can be hard to shift afterwards.
Add in the extra dose of sugar your child will be consuming from eating all those treats, sweets and fizzy drinks and you really could have a recipe for something a lot less fun. Sugar - and caffeine too for that matter - are known for making children a bit over-excited, but feelings of excitement that give a buzzy feeling inside the body, are very similar to those of anxiety. It’s not uncommon for the two to blur into one, leaving many children feeling confused.
Bedtime anxiety
As we all know, anxiety often increases at bedtime when it gets dark - precisely the moment when you’re hoping your child will start to wind down and relax. Here’s a very useful technique that I regularly use in my practice and this will help you leave the gruesomeness of Halloween behind.
The mind and body are very closely connected – so if your child is experiencing a feeling of fear, it’s being triggered off by mental images that are made up of pictures and internal dialogue. Think back to the last time you watched a scary movie at the cinema or on TV. Even though you knew it was all make-believe, simply watching those images easily triggered off palpitations, sweaty palms and anxious feelings. Exactly the same happens to children after Halloween parties.
How to calm down your child during a night terror
1. Tell your child that you’re going to teach them how to play an ‘imagination game’. Start by asking them to imagine they have a magic TV control in their hand.
2. Then, ask them what comes to mind when they feel anxious and scared. If they feel comfortable to do this, ask them to describe their thoughts out loud with lots of detail.
3. Tell them that you’re now going to show them a very clever way of getting rid of all those nasty images in their thoughts. Using the ‘magic TV control’ ask them to ‘turn the colour down’ on those pictures to make them less vivid and bright.
4. Next, ask them if there’s any dialogue, music or sounds that go with the scary image in their mind. And if so, ask them to use their magic control once more, to turn the volume right down to nothing more than a whisper.
5. Encourage them to continue adjusting the picture in this way - draining all the colour out of it, making it black and white and removing any traces of sound.
6. Then, by pressing the buttons on their magic control once more, they can start shrinking the image right down till it’s nothing more than a dot.
7. Simply by pressing the ‘off’ button on the imaginary TV control, the dot will now completely vanish.
After all, if you were watching something on a real TV that you weren’t enjoying, you’d switch it off, wouldn’t you? You certainly wouldn’t sit and continue to watch it. In the same way, there’s no good reason to keep unenjoyable thoughts in the mind.
You can finish by asking your child to put a good picture in place instead. What’s their favourite TV show, for example? Or do they have a ‘happy place’, a favourite pet or friend they’d rather be focusing on? Conjure up a new image and allow them to relax and sleep looking at good pictures instead.
About the Author
Alicia Eaton is a Harley Street based Psychotherapist and Clinical Hypnotherapist and the author of four best-selling books. She’s also a Winner in the latest ‘Global Health & Pharma’ Mental Health Awards 2023. For more details of appointments see here: Consultations.