Adolescence is a time of great changes, both physically and emotionally. These changes push the youngest to quickly develop strategies to adapt to the environment. Among so many changes and new experiences, adolescents can show a high degree of anxiety, stress and irritability, both in family relationships and in the school environment, even seriously interfering with their mental stability. Irritable behavior in schools usually translates into complicated relationships between teachers and adolescents; a similar phenomenon can occur in the family environment and both feed the same anxiety that generates them.
To avoid reaching these situations, you can put into practice some simple relaxation techniques. These exercises are specifically designed for adolescents, they can reduce anxiety and thus avoid the emotional explosions so common in them. In addition, these techniques can help control nerves in circumstances that are stressful for them. If you want to know more to learn the best relaxation techniques for teenagerswe invite you to continue reading this Psychology-Online article.
Guided relaxation for teenagers
It is difficult to communicate with a teenager to kindly invite him to participate in a guided meditation session. The key to this will be to accompany them ourselves or provide them with guidelines so that they can practice meditation independently.
Guided Meditation Exercises for Teens
First of all, it is essential to be in a comfortable and noise-free space that can bother us. We must sit down and close our eyes to begin to visualize situations or places that transmit calm to us. These techniques will help us mentally distance ourselves from the stressors that surround the adolescent.
Once we have visualized what calms us (a relaxing beach, a forest, a lake…) we must keep your eyes closed. Slowly, we can enter those imaginary places, following slow breathing and paying attention to our feelings and emotions. We can visualize and imagine how calm we would be if we were really in that place. Seeing ourselves that way can activate parts of the cerebral cortex that provide real relaxation. To finish the exercise, we must open our eyes slowly and keep breathing calmly. We can observe how the feeling of calm is maintained and the stress has dissipated to a certain degree.
Muscle relaxation exercises
It is important to note that, in parallel with mental relaxation, there is also physical or muscular relaxation. These exercises can help calm the adolescent’s mood. Are easier to apply Since the guidelines are more basic, it is not about visualizing but rather learning specific breathing or muscle relaxation patterns. These techniques have also been shown to be effective for sleep and good sleep hygiene.
Muscle relaxation exercises can be applied in educational centers during the physical education subject.In fact, it has been shown that practicing these techniques after a physical education session achieves stabilize the heart rate of adolescents very effectively1
Diaphragmatic breathing exercises
We don’t usually pay attention to the way we breathe during our daily lives. Something as vital as breathing can help us achieve an optimal state of relaxation in adolescents.
Diaphragmatic breathing is based on paying attention to where we put the air when we inhale. If we don’t think about it, we usually breathe so that we only use the upper part of the chest. However, to relax, we must try to direct the inhaled air to the lower part of the lungs.
It begins breathing in very slowly, letting the air penetrate through the lungs to the abdomen. As we inhale, we notice how the abdomen swells. To make breathing as relaxing as possible, we can make a mental image of a balloon that, slowly and at the rate of our breathing, inflates. Then we breathe out, imagining how that balloon is deflating. We repeat this breathing and visualization exercise several times until we feel relaxed.
Diaphragms are very simple and, at the same time, useful for anxiety and to relax adolescents.
Jacobson’s progressive muscle relaxation
The Jacobson relaxation It is also a method that we can practice with adolescents, either individually or in a group. To do this, we will let them sit or lie down and we will indicate the sequence of the exercise until complete relaxation is achieved. The steps to get one correct are very easy to apply:
- First of all there is the tension-distension phaseIn it, we must tense a part of the body and then relax it for the same period of time. This exercise has to be repeated a few times and on the main muscle groups. To finish this phase, we will have to check that all the muscles are relaxed.
- Mental relaxation: Once the main muscle groups have relaxed, it is time to pay attention to the mind. In this phase, you can use the guided meditation exercises that we have discussed previously in this article.
Mindfulness or conscious attention
Although it is many years old, this therapy has now spread throughout the world and, recently, in clinical psychology.
He (or Mindfulness therapy) is a practice that is based on becoming aware of everything that surrounds us at all times, paying attention to internal stimuli and the sensations that our body transmits to us. To do an exercise based on mindfulness, we close our eyes and we concentrate on all the sounds we hear: a door opening, the neighbor’s footsteps, a dog barking… then we concentrate on ourselves, on the sounds we make, when breathing, when we move slightly… then we concentrate again on external sounds and open our eyes.
The benefits of this type of practice are multiple, it has been shown to calm the symptoms of stress and anxiety. In addition, today, its effect on other types of mental illnesses such as depression and anxiety is being studied.
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
References
- Toledo Amador, A., Abreu Pérez, N., Pérez Silva, ME, & Howard Ofarrill, R. (2006). Effectiveness of the modified Schultz relaxation technique in the final part of the physical education class. Medical Archive Magazine of Camagüey, 10(3), 106-118.