New York Times bestselling author, visionary, and mom of four Jennie Allen offers a practical guide to help kids form positive habits and connections that are crucial to their mental and spiritual health. Spinning, anxious thoughts can sometimes take over our minds and not let go, but we have the power to choose what to think and believe—and so do our children. In this edition for young readers, bestselling author Jennie Allen draws on the insights, truth, and experiences from her New York Times bestsellers Get Out of Your Head and Find Your People to help younger kids and tweens: • trade fear, anxiety, loneliness, and shame for God’s love and peace • learn how to notice lies and believe what’s true • hit pause on negative thoughts and retrain their brains to think life-giving thoughts • gain tools to rely on God’s power and truth every day Kids don’t have to be at the mercy of toxic input and negative thoughts. In these pages, they’ll discover exactly how to interrupt swirling thought patterns, develop better friendships, and create new day-to-day habits that will lead them closer to God and to a life of peace, joy, and love. Y ou Are Not Alone includes questions, action steps, Bible verses, and real-life stories to help them be who God has called them to be. Jennie Allen is the founder and visionary of IF:Gathering as well as the New York Times bestselling author of Find Your People , Get Out of Your Head, Made for This , Anything , and Nothing to Prove . A frequent speaker at national events and conferences, she is a passionate leader, following God’s call on her life to catalyze a generation to live what they believe. Jennie earned a master’s in biblical studies from Dallas Theological Seminary. She and her husband, Zac, have four children. 1 Letter to the Reader Hi, friend. Chances are if you are reading these words, the thoughts in your brain feel a little chaotic sometimes. Have you ever played on a Sit ’n Spin? In case you never have, they are big plastic disks with a handle in the middle, like a kid-­sized spinning top. You wrap your legs around the middle, sit down, and spin yourself. Sit and spin. That is my brain. Fear and worry constantly bother me. I sit in my anxious thoughts and spin around and around. When I started a new school in ninth grade, my brain was extra spinny. I walked in to find my gray locker in a sea of humans I had never seen before. They all seemed perfectly at ease in the chaos. I was not. I couldn’t find my locker, and no one offered to help me. I started to spin. Questions whirred around me . . .  • Does anyone like me? • Does anyone want to be my friend? • Does anyone even know I exist? Being a person who always felt like she had to win everyone’s approval, this year of school about did me in. Every night as I would try to fall asleep, my brain kept crawling onto my imaginary Sit ’n Spin. I spent hours whirling in worry. We worry about the things we love, the things that matter most to us. At that point in my life, what mattered most was acceptance, approval, fitting in. We worry about what we value. I valued the admiration and approval of my family and friends. So I would lie in bed and worry about what they thought. The unknown opinions of a few people took over my mind. Since then I’ve learned that me and my spinny brain are not alone! Lots of us sit and spin. That means you are not alone either. (You’re going to see a bunch of special sections throughout this book titled “You Said . . .” The answers to the questions in those sections came from people your age.) This is a book about all the ways our brains can spin—­and all the ways God wants to help us with our spinny brains. You are not alone! ••• How do you deal with big thoughts and feelings? If you’re like me, sometimes you don’t! Some days it feels like your thoughts and feelings are running wild. They feel huge and mysterious. You get overwhelmed, melt down, and freeze up. You can feel so discombobulated or nervous or embarrassed that it’s downright scary. And once the cycle starts, it just keeps going, doesn’t it? Like a spiral sliding down, down, down. It’s a terrible feeling! And it can seem like it’s running the show in your life. I bet you don’t want to live this way. Neither do I! So why do we feel so stuck inside our spinning heads and sinking hearts? It’s crazy if you think about it: How can something we can’t see—­ thoughts —­control so much? Our thoughts often decide: • what we feel • what we do • what we say or don’t say • how we move • how we sleep • what we want • what we hate • what we love In this book, we’re going to learn how to stop anxious thoughts. The thing is, you can choose what to think about! But you will need some help. Learning this new skill will take tools, training, and most of all, prayer and grace from God. But you can do it