Table of contents:
- Guided relaxation for teens
- Guided meditation exercises for teens
- Muscle relaxation exercises
- Diaphragmatic breathing exercises
- Jacobson's progressive muscle relaxation
- Mindfulness or conscious attention
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Adolescence is a time of great change, both physically and emotionally. These changes push the youngest to rapidly develop strategies for adaptation 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 behaviors in schools tend to translate into complicated dealings 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 outbursts so common in them. In addition, these techniques can help control nerves in stressful circumstances. If you want to know more to learn the best relaxation techniques for adolescents, we invite you to continue reading this Psychology-Online article.
You may also be interested in: Aggression in adolescents: causes and treatment Index- Guided relaxation for teens
- Muscle relaxation exercises
- Diaphragmatic breathing exercises
- Jacobson's progressive muscle relaxation
- Mindfulness or conscious attention
Guided relaxation for teens
It is difficult to reach out to a teenager to politely invite them to participate in a guided meditation session. The key to this will be to accompany them ourselves or provide guidelines for them to exercise meditation independently.
Guided meditation exercises for teens
In the first place, it is essential to be in a comfortable space and free from noise that may bother us. We must sit down and close our eyes to begin to visualize situations or places that convey calm to us. These techniques will help us to mentally distance ourselves from the stressors that surround the adolescent.
Once we have visualized what transmits calm to us (a relaxing beach, a forest, a lake…) we must keep our eyes closed. Slowly, we can enter these imaginary places, following a slow breathing and paying attention to our feelings and emotions. We can visualize and imagine how calm we would be if we were actually 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 our breathing calm. We can get to observe how the feeling of calm is maintained and the stress has dissipated to a certain degree.
Muscle relaxation exercises
It is important to comment that, in parallel to mental relaxation, there is also physical or muscular relaxation. These exercises can help calm your teen's stress and anxiety. They are easier to apply since the guidelines are more basic, it is not about visualizing but about 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 course. In fact, practicing these techniques after a physical education session has been shown to stabilize the heart rate of adolescents very effectively 1
Diaphragmatic breathing exercises
We do not usually pay attention to the way we breathe during our day to day life. 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 inhaling. If we don't think about it, we usually breathe so that we only use the upper part of the thorax. However, in order to relax, we must try to direct the inhaled air towards the lower area of the lungs.
You begin by inhaling very slowly, letting the air penetrate through the lungs to the abdomen. As we breathe in, 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 with the rhythm of our breathing, it inflates. Then we expire, imagining how that balloon is deflating. We repeat this breathing and visualization exercise several times until we feel relaxed.
Diaphragmatic breathing exercises are very simple and, in turn, useful for anxiety and to relax adolescents.
Jacobson's progressive muscle relaxation
The relaxation of Jacobson is also a method that can practice with adolescents, either individually or in groups. To do this, we will let them sit or lie down and we will indicate the sequence of the exercise until we achieve complete relaxation. The steps to achieve a correct progressive muscle relaxation are very easy to apply:
- In the first place there is the tension-relaxation phase, in it, we must tension a part of the body and then relax it for the same time interval. 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 earlier in this article.
Mindfulness or conscious attention
Despite being many years old, this therapy has now spread throughout the world and recently in clinical psychology.
Mindfulness (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 concentrate on all the sounds we hear: a door opening, the neighbor's footsteps, a barking dog… then we concentrate on ourselves, on the sounds that we make, when we breathe, when we move slightly… then we return to concentrate on external sounds and open our eyes.
The benefits of this type of practice are multiple, it has been shown to calm symptoms of stress and anxiety. In addition, to date, its effect on other types of mental illnesses such as depression and borderline personality disorder is being studied.
This article is merely informative, in 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.
If you want to read more articles similar to Relaxation techniques for adolescents, we recommend that you enter our category of Emotional and Behavioral Disorders.
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. Camagüey Medical Archive Magazine , 10 (3), 106-118.