Anxiety can make connecting with friends hard. Add COVID, lockdowns, social distancing, and isolation to the mix, and it can feel overwhelming.

With this COVID year, we’ve had to focus so much on ourselves and our mental health. Stress has been at an all time high. So it makes sense that connecting with friends, especially after losing contact with them over 2020, feels hard to do.

Anxious people need friends, even when their anxiety and stress makes it hard.

And you may have worries about what they think or how they’ll react when you reach out again. That’s ok and normal! Of course you have anxiety around that. But that anxiety shouldn’t keep you from doing the things you need to do to benefit yourself, your mental health and, yes, your friendships that have fallen by the wayside.

Teen motivation is at an all time low.

For everyone, here in 2021. COVID is still happening. We’re still worried about the novel coronavirus. We’re still locked down. Schools are still mostly virtual. Meet ups are still mostly online. There’s a ton of stress, anxiety, and burnout roiling around for everyone.

So how on earth can you still be motivated, as a teen, during this pandemic?

Well, there are a few options - but it’s important, throughout this blog post, to remember that you can’t expect yourself to be as motivated as usual. Burnout is to be expected.

Finding a way to be a motivated student, even with anxiety and burnout:

We need to figure out how to still get enough done, in a good enough way - rather than focusing on getting everything done, and doing everything perfectly - a common issue for teens with anxiety.

Below, you’ll find tons of intervention ideas from therapists in the field, who specifically work with kids and teens, and who deeply recognize that things are different right now.

There are a lot of new stressors in our lives right now.

We’ve all had to get used to a new normal during this global pandemic. For a lot of our parents, one of the biggest challenges is moving school from the classroom to the kitchen table. Whether your kids are attending classes over Zoom or you have now been put in charge of teaching the material, no doubt this is a major adjustment for everyone. It’s okay to feel overwhelmed!