Supporting Our Valued Adolescents: A place to learn, share your strength, be positive, and grow.
Self-care has become a term that always pops up when talking about mental health and wellness. The most common image is that of meditating, taking a bath, or doing a face mask. And while this is great, self-care is so much more than that. While these moments of nurture are helpful, self-care is a radical act for many as they learn to put their needs, emotions, and well-being first.
Stories describing the amount of pressure young people face beginning at a young age have been around for a while. As the pressures get stronger and increase in number, however, it affects younger generations more and more. This week, we want to feature a couple of accounts of young people describing the pressures they face and the issues that burnout has been having on them.
Have you ever experienced an upset stomach, a tight chest, clammy hands, or any other physical reaction when you’re stressed or depressed? The mind and body have an incredibly strong connection, and when you’re feeling an overwhelming amount of emotion, your brain can process it as being in danger even if the situation isn’t life-threatening. This initiates and is referred to as the fight-flight-freeze response.
Shame, shame, shame. This term seems to be thrown around a lot in conversation about mental health. It is something that I remember hearing Brené Brown define as an “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.”
When we are stressed, it can feel like our brains our scrambled and it can be difficult to sort through all the noise. Life can get very busy, and it can be overwhelming keeping up with everything. Setting SMART goals can go a long way in helping us to stay on track. Sometimes though, it’s helpful to have all our thoughts and things to do in one easy-to-access place. While planners are extremely helpful, it isn’t always possible to keep one on us.
For a number of reasons, young people today are incredibly privileged to have access to empathetic and thoughtful therapists. However, for children of South Asian immigrants, it can be awkward at times to bridge the culture gap with a therapist from a different background. Many scenarios South Asian youths want to discuss in therapy are deeply tied to their cultural identity. Therapists can help navigate these experiences, but South Asians often find themselves giving a lot of context and education.
Mental health affects everyone differently, but our backgrounds and identities can have us bond over similar experiences and feelings based on our cultures and how others perceive and interact with us.
Truthfully, the chances that your sleep schedule aren’t the best are quite high. Adolescents in high school and college, despite needing a sufficient amount of sleep, do not get the recommended 8ish hours of uninterrupted sleep per night. There are tons of reasons for this: technology, caffeine, and just being too busy are just a few factors, to name a few.
We wanted to use today’s post to highlight personal essays from Latino youth and how their culture and personal experiences have played a part in their mental health and coping mechanisms. Studies and news reports are showing that Latino adolescents and young adults struggled with their mental health throughout the pandemic, and this comes on top of existing reports of increases in depressive symptoms.
Choosing a therapist can be confusing, and there are so many different types of therapy. A common practice style is called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). The goal of CBT is to help you identify thought patterns, examine how they affect behavior, and change the patterns that are not helping you.
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