Supporting Our Valued Adolescents: A place to learn, share your strength, be positive, and grow.
You’ve likely heard that being a “morning person” can benefit one’s mental health significantly. You’ve probably seen a bunch of stories about how waking up with the and even before the sun helps people...
On October 13th, 2022 I stumbled across a post from The New York Times about “The Nap Bishop.” When in college, The Nap Ministry founder Tricia Hershey was constantly busy working, studying, taking care...
As one of the more notable symptoms of depression, napping or sleeping for long periods of time can suck time out of the day. Naps during the day mean that the time to do...
We know that sleep is important for our health and improving our mood. However, nightmares can really disturb our sleep, leaving us feeling anxious, spooked, and tired. The Nightmare Protocol is a multi-step process to help deal with nightmares. This DBT technique is really helpful for re-occurring nightmares.
Quite often, the first piece of advice we receive when trying to change our sleeping habits and to get a better night’s sleep is to put our phone (and all other types of screens and technology) away. Experts recommend that adolescents get at least 8-10 hours of sleep a night, and, to ensure staying asleep, to avoid screen time at least 30 minutes to 1 hour before you plan to call it a night.
It may be hard for some to remember the last time that they got a proper, full night’s sleep. Schoolwork, jobs, and extracurricular activities are just a few things that can contribute to an adolescent’s hectic and busy schedule. Simply put, there aren’t enough hours in the day for people to do everything that they want, and they often sacrifice the time they should be using sleeping to get everything else done.
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.
Most of us do not like being told what to do. It can be as minor as a parent telling us to do an easy chore, or someone you don’t know that well telling you how to do something. This even includes your own brain: for example, you may tell yourself to start that homework assignment or put your laundry away, and instead…you would rather not.
You may have heard about the danger of depression naps before. However, this isn’t to imply that all naps are bad for you – in fact, they’re incredibly beneficial!
The situation may be all too familiar: you have an important event coming up, or worse, happening the very next day. It’s a job interview, a big test, the playoffs for the sport you play, a move to a new apartment, the start of a significant school year. No matter what it is, you can’t seem to sleep, like, at all. Your body is waking you up throughout the night, or it might not let you go to sleep at all, and you’re just lying there, trying to keep your eyes closed in your dark room despite being fully conscious.
