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COACHING
Feel Good Tools for Teens: all under 3 minutes!
Understanding what is anxiety
This 3 minutes video explains what is anxiety and what happens when we are anxious. Understanding anxiety and why we are feeling anxious is the first step to reducing it.
Calming the Mind: Try Belly Breathing
Deep abdominal breathing alters your psychological state, making you calmer, more able to focus and reduces stress hormones. When practicing diaphragmatic breathing, the stomach, rather than the chest, moves with each breath, expanding while inhaling and contracting while exhaling. In this 3 minutes video, you will practice extending your exhales so that they are a little longer than your inhales to make you relax.
Managing your emotions: accept them to let them go
When feeling overwhelmed by an emotion such as stress, frustration, anger, anxiety, sadness, embarrassment etc... our initial response might be to try to push these emotions away. However, studies show that accepting and observing the negative emotion works better and allows us to move on faster. Listen to this audio whenever you need help dealing with strong emotions.
Emotions SOS Audio
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Tool for immediate stress release: sighing
In this short 3 minutes video, Stanford professor of neurosciences Huberman demonstrates how physiological sigh - a pattern of breathing of two inhales followed by an extended exhale - releases stress at time when you want to reduce your levels of anxiety and calm down fast.
Feel good about getting organised
Learning to get organised, to stay focused and to get things done is not just about school work. It can actually help you to get more time for fun stuff and downtime. Use the this weekly schedule for term time and make a different one for revisions during the holidays. Start by writing down the fun and relaxing activities and then add in the school work. By writing both down you'll be more inclined to look at it and stick to it.
Feeling a little down? Try joy conditioning
In her book Healthy Brain, Happy Life, NYU professor Wendy Suzuki shares her 25 years of research on anxiety. In this video, she explains one of her favourite brain hacks "joy conditioning" which enables you to go back to a past memory through smell, and find yourself in the associated happy sate of mind.
A variation from regular meditation
Dr Benson was a professor at Harvard Medical school and a cardiologist and developed a relaxation technique based on Transcendental Meditation. Chose a word which evokes relaxation such as love or peace and repeat it while relaxing. When a thought comes to your mind, just push it away gently by saying "Oh well". The first time will take you 10 minutes but then you can bring it down to a 3 minutes practice. It is all explained in this video.
Practice compassion
It's easy to judge ourselves more harshly that we would judge any of our good friends. Practicing compassion towards ourselves is a key step in developing self-esteem and in changing our mindset to being kinder and more loving towards ourselves, which will lead to being more compassionate towards others too. Use this tool to practice compassion.
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