Parents of Depressed Teens

Help for Parents and caregivers of Depressed Teens

Parents of Depressed Teens

Teach your teen to meditate

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Meditation has been around for centuries but in the last five years it’s grown in popularity particularly among young adults. Read the article below on meditation. It may be something you can introduce to your teen.  A good way to teach about it is through yoga. Many yoga classes involved some meditation at the end. Teaching good habits to your teen now will help them as they move into adulthood.  You may also want to share one of Kay Walker’s moodboosters (link below) with them. It’s a good introduction to guided meditation with music and they’ve been quite popular among teens.

Teach your teen to meditate

Meditation is a Buddhist derived practice that teaches you how to control and focus your thoughts, as well as, how you react in conjunction to what you think.  During the meditative act you learn how to develop a state of attention that’s highly alert and relaxed. The ultimate goal is to learn the skill of objectivity.  To “be with what is” in reality, with indifference to it.

What does meditation do to your brainThere are numerous types of meditation and each has specific guidelines.  For example, Metta meditation involves focusing thoughts on compassion. Vipassana meditation is highly active and involves being completely aware of physical states (some painful and some not) and being non-reactive to what you feel. In general, all types fall into one of two categories:

  1. Focused attention: involves focusing your attention on an object or subject during the whole meditation session. This object may be your breath, a mantra, a part of the body, an object, or a something you visualize such as a memory
  2. Open monitoring: keeping your attention open means monitoring all aspects of what you are experiencing and doing your best to be objective about it.

Meditation can be done while sitting but you can also actively meditate while walking or standing.

What does meditation do to your brain?

What scientific communities say about meditation:

Scientific studies prove that meditation has many benefits.  It’s been known to reverse heart disease, pain, regulate emotion, reduce stress and increase the body’s immune system and its ability of prevent and fight disease.

When the brains of meditators and non-meditators are compared their are also common structural changes. Most meditators have higher levels of Alpha waves, which helps to lessen anxiety and depression. There amygdala (a brain region that regulates emotion) is smaller while areas of learning, memory, and emotion regulation are larger and function better.

  • A 2014 study at Johns Hopkins found meditation to be as effective as antidepressants for treating depression.
  • In a study conducted by Harvard Medical School, researchers used MRI technology (a form of brain imaging) that allowed them to view activity in the brain during meditation.  Their findings showed that key brain regions activated was in charge of the autonomic nervous system, which regulates blood pressure and digestion. Those processes are intrinsically linked to stress response.

Benefits many people experience from meditation:

  • less anger
  • less stress
  • better sleep
  • fear reduction
  • physical sensations linked to emotions are reduced
  • better ability to socialize with other people (especially for people with social anxiety)
  • improved focus
  • improved attention and concentration
  • greater objectivity during life situation
  • increase patience
  • feeling more joyful
  • feeling more relaxed
  • greater empathy

A quick and easy way to try mediation:

  • Find a quiet space with no one around or distractions. Ensure the environment is dark and the temperature is comfortable for you.
  • Sit or lay in a comfortable position. You can be on the ground, in a chair, or bed
  • Set a 15 minute timer (you can increase the time as you get better)
  • Once you start the timer for fifteen minutes you will practice sitting quietly and focusing on your breath. Breath in through your nose and out through your nose. Focus on feeling the sensation of your breath. Focus on the sensations you feel as your breath moves in an out of your nose. Do this for the entire 15 minutes.  You will have thoughts during this time. Some will make sense and some won’t. When you have a though just allow yourself to think it and then practice setting it aside and bring your focus back to your breath.

This 15 minutes will likely be very difficult if you are not experienced in meditation.  Each time you practice, increase your time by 5 minutes. Try to work yourself up to an hour/day.

The key to knowing your meditation is working is that after a session you will feel relaxed, calm and joyful.

If you understand the benefits of meditation and want to teach it to your teen, you can try to get the interested by sharing a moodbooster with them. Each moodbooster paris music and coaching to help shift negative mood states. Download a free track here.

Teach mindfulness to your teen

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Mindfulness is a skill of awareness that helps your monitor your emotions and behaviors in order to intercept and control them. It’s a brilliant tool that you can teach to your teen and use yourself. Read the article below to learn about mindfulness. Try the exercise at the bottom and share it with your teen if you think they’ll be interested.

Teach mindfulness to your teen

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness is the act of maintaining moment-by-moment awareness of your thoughts, feelings, the sensations your body experiences, as well as, your surroundings. It involves being non-judgmental of each experience that you observe.  From this perspective there is no morality, no “right” or “wrong”.

The practice comes from the fundamentals of Buddhist meditation. Though,  it can be practiced during daily life away from being in a meditative state.

Since 1979 a secularized version of mindfulness was used in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), that was launched at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

What’s the purpose of mindfulness?

The purpose of mindfulness is to heighten your sense of awareness of yourself.  This way you learn to see yourself from a perspective an outside view. You see in yourself as another person may experience you.  The notion is that when you learn to see yourself more clearly you can learn how to deal with your thoughts, feelings and behaviors in a way that is proactive and beneficial for what you truly desire.

Mindfulness training teaches you:

  • How to notice what you’re experience in a given moment.  Being in a mindful state is like observing an object under a microscope.  You don’t just see it you see it’s particles.
  • Be aware of your sensations and your breathing, and how not to react to negative emotions.
  • Recognize your thoughts and how they create your emotional experience. Learn that your thoughts and feelings change and are not based in reality.
  • Get more joy out of life by being hyper-focused on the experience of life.

A quick exercise in mindfulness:

An easy way to understand mindfulness is to take 5 minutes to do this quick exercise.

  1.  Prepare a small segment of orange. If you don’t have an orange you can use a different piece of fruit, or a small piece of food (like chocolate).
  2. Set a 5 minute timer.
  3. Sit in a quiet place with little distractions.
  4. From the moment you start the timer you will spend 5 minutes examining the orange (or piece of food). Look at it as if you are looking at it under a microscope. Observe the texture of it’s peel. Observe it’s pulp. Observe the color. Smell the orange. Now put the orange in your mouth. Feel the way it feels. Take a bite. Taste it but don’t indulge in the flavor. Mindfulness is about observing how something is without judgement. If you have thoughts about how good it tastes acknowledge your thoughts and bring your awareness back to the orange. Experience the orange for the entire 5 minutes.

Spending 5 minutes observing an orange may seem silly. The point is to learn how to refine your awareness. It’s also to learn to accept how things are, to accept reality without judging it.

Mindfulness practice helps you to understand why you do the things you do. When you understand that you are doing something, or what thoughts are involved in making you behave in ways you don’t want to, you can learn to choose new ways of handling situations.

Teach your teen the future projections exercise

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One major challenge for teens is that they haven’t learned how to separate their emotions from their reality. For teens the world becomes overly dramatic at times. The live in their feelings, so when life isn’t going their way their actions are thwarted.

An important lesson to teach your teen is about the reality of time. It will help them deal with intense challenges and emotions and remember that their circumstances now won’t stay this way forever.  Read the article below and share what it teaches with your teen. Share the exercise below too.

Teach your teen the future projections exercise

When you are dealing with a difficult period in your life it’s important to remember the concept of time.  Here’s a definition to consider:

Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.

Simply put, time is a continuum that starts the minute you are born and it never stops.  With each second  of a day that passes you become a different person.

This is a scientific fact. Even if you think you are the same and feel the same from moment to moment you are different. Your biology changes by the second. Your environment changes. And together these aspects shape you in the present moment.

This concept is at the core of Buddhist teachings. They call it impermanence. It is a term used to explain that the world and our existence is in a constant state of flux.  Time passes on no matter what and no one can stop it.

This is an especially important concept to consider in moments where life is not working the you way you want it to. Sometimes it feels that things will never change or that it will never get better. That is impossible.

While feelings are relevant to the way you experience the world it has nothing to do with reality. Feelings can’t be measured in distance, time and form. And feelings change from moment to moment as time shifts and new things happen.

So, no matter how bad your situation, it helps to understand that it is inevitable that your situation will change. It may get worse for a while. It may get better.  But life is a constant state of ups and downs.

The more you accept that life is constantly changing with your control the more you can learn to go with the flow and take heart in bad times knowing it will get better.  What goes up inevitably must go down, and vice versa.  Sometimes it goes far down. But it always comes back up eventually.

Future projections exercise

  1. Find a quiet place to sit or lay with no distractions
  2. Set a 5 minute timer
  3. Close your eyes
  4. In your mind visualize yourself as you are right now.  Get present to your clothes, your body, your surroundings. Get present to your unhappiness. Get present to your depression.  Feel your sadness. Feel your pain. Do this for 1-2 minutes. Now, shift your thoughts to a future time where you are happy. You can be doing anything in this future memory. Include people you want. Cloth yourself and create your body the way you want it to look.  Feel how happy you are. See yourself doing something you love.  Think about how great it all is.  Stay in this memory for as long as you like or shift to another memory. If you like you can even travel to the past and visit your past accomplishments. Feel the happiness in moments that were incredible.
  5. When you open your eyes you will wake up and life will be as it was when you closes your eyes. But know it is now 5 minutes beyond the time it was so the world is already a different place. You are already closer to your future memory. What is right now, won’t be soon.

Keep this old adage present as you move into your day: “This too, shall pass”

Teach your teen how to use affirmations

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Affirmations are valuable tools for adults and teens who would like to change any limiting beliefs they have about themselves or their lives. Read the article about affirmations below to learn how you can teach your teen how to use them.

For teens specifically they work well when used prior to any type of performance, tests at school and to start to develop good self concepts.

What is an affirmation?

An affirmation is a statement or phrase that is either real or made up, that you say repeatedly to yourself to reinforce its truth. What you believe about yourself or a situations shapes your thoughts and your thoughts shape your behavior. So, if you can shift what you believe by forcing yourself to learn a new “truth”, your thoughts and behaviors will transform, as well.

Affirmations and how they work:

How affirmations work:

Your brain does not know the difference between what is real and what is fantasy. It’s easy to understand this concept by thinking about the way you interact with a movie.  Sometimes you get so caught up in what is happening on screen that you empathize with the characters by crying or laughing. (Aside: The same is true for visualizations. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between a imagining action and actually doing it).

Affirmations help you reframe your thought patterns through the science of neuroplasticity. This is the brain’s ability to change structure through the process of thinking.  So processes that involve thinking – such as learning a new skill – have the ability to reshape the brain’s anatomy in both positive and negative ways.

Quick example of neuroplasticity: One famous study that led to the discovery of neuroplastictiy, proved that London taxi cab drivers had a larger brain region for memory (called the hippocampus) retention due to the job’s demands on them drivers ability to remember routes.

Affirmations allow you to shift what you think about a situation more quickly. Sometimes, even if you don’t quite believe them, they can help you think positively. Or they allow you to hold a reality based thought in your focus while you have a tendency to think otherwise.

That means, if you were once told you were fat when you were young, even as an adult you may have a tendency to think “I’m fat” or “I’m going to get fat”. And those thoughts may have nothing to do with your current reality if you stand on the scale. Eitherway, you tend to see the thought before the truth and that thought shapes your actions, in this case, dieting, starving yourself, working out to an extreme etc.

Thoughts get worse when they aren’t challenged by reality. This happens especially if you don’t test the thoughts in the real world by asking others for their opinion to validate what’s in your head. Additionally, when you spend too much time alone the thoughts learn to go round and round and can become pervasive and obsessive.

Choosing or creating an affirmation:

How do you know what to say to yourself? You can choose to say a phrase that empowers you by reading something that is already written.  Choose a quote and repeat it over and over. Start with five minutes a day. Use a phrase the helps you break out from your depressed mood, or make you feel a bite better. It could be as simple as: “This time in my life will pass, tomorrow will be better”. Or as personal as “I am the best Mary Kay sales woman in the region. Today I will land six sales. I will make calls I don’t want to make because I know the more conversations I have today, the closer I will get to earning a new car”

Affirmations don’t have to be true, but they do have to be believable to you and possible in reality. Therefore this would only work: “I will help millions of people” , if you believe you can actually do this. It is a stretch for some people.

How to create an affirmation that makes you feel confident, excites you, or improves your thoughts about a situation:

  1. Decide what it is you want most for yourself in the near future.
  2. Write down the reality of where you are in relation to that future. These should be FACTS only. That means they are variables that can be measured in distance time and form.
  3. The last one to four sentences should be positive or “I will” sentences that are completely made up but realistic and related to what you want in your future.
  4. Your affirmation can be as long or short as you want it to be.  You should not go over 25 sentences. It should be something you can read 1 or more times a day to presence yourself to what you’d like to achieve.

EXAMPLE:

“I have been living with a depressed mood for eight months. My body aches.  I have less energy than I used to.  I tend to sleep as much as I can through the day. I am frustrated because I’ve seen many doctors and am not getting healthier. I am taking antidepressants but I am getting sicker. I’ve gained 30lbs. I have suicidal thoughts.

I know that 90% of people who suffer from depression get better. It may take some time but and even thought I feel sick, I am taking positive actions. I am doing everything I can. I have an incredible family and friends in my support system. I am loved. I hated my body right now but I love myself.

When I get better I will save millions of people by sharing what I’ve learned. I feel bad today but tomorrow I will hope to feel better. If not tomorrow, I will likely feel better in the near future. I know what goes down must come up”.

OR

“Today is the worst day of my life. I will keep living for my family. I have a wife and kids that need me. Tomorrow will be a better day if I continue to take healthy actions towards my recovery”

OR

“This too shall pass”

OR

“I am a beautiful gift to the world”

Or, start with music:

If you aren’t ready for affirmations or think it’s not for you another way to use the similar technique is to listen to a song over and over that makes you feel good. Repeatedly singing postive lyrics can make you feel confident and help you shift your mood and focus.

For example: “I am Super woman. Yes I am, Yes I am.” – from Alicia Keys song “Superwoman”

 

Want an easy way to try an affirmation? Sample a DZ Moodbooster which pairs affirmations and coaching with music. CLICK HERE.

Teach your teen wellness

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During the teenage years it is crucial parents teach their kids about the concept of wellness and what it means to live well. A base understanding can help teens focus their efforts on building a life of balance.  Read this article to learn a unique DZ approach to what wellness means. Use it yourself. Teach it to your teen.

Teach your teen wellness

What is: Wellness?

The term “wellness” means having a mostly positive state of mind and a physically fit body, which results in a feeling of satisfaction for your life.

“Mostly positive” because your state of mind changes on a moment to moment basis.  Wellness doesn’t mean you are always happy. It means you have a baseline of happiness that comes from being satisfied with your life, this does not go away when difficult life challenges arise.

How do you know if you’re “well”? Defining wellness:

Wellness is difficult to measure because it’s not something tangible we can see.  It can’t be graded in distance, time, or form.  It can only be measured by the way you feel.  And while feelings are valid, because they dictate what we do in life, they can’t be seen or mapped.  Feelings are individual. It’s a personal evaluation that relates to the overall level of satisfaction that you have for your life.

But what satisfies one person doesn’t necessary satisfy another person.  In general wellness can be characterized in the following way:

If your desires match the actions you’re taking – in other words, you are working towards what you’d like to accomplish -, and you’re body is functioning properly, you are well.

Factors that relate to wellness

Evaluating Wellness:

Many experts and organizations try to evaluate wellness by suggesting that humans have basic needs that must be met for us to feel well.  What those needs are vary from expert to expert. Most wellness experts suggest that up to six of these areas of overall wellness make up what a person considers a satisfactory life:

Occupational health: satisfaction with your career

Physical health: satisfaction with your body and level of physical health

Spiritual health: connectedness with yourself and your values, which is often connected to a vehicle for you to connect with yourself, this could be Religion or Meditative practices.

Emotional health: understanding your feelings, why you feel them and how to deal with them

Intellectual health: challenging what you think and increasing your learning continuously

Social health: connecting intimately with people, this could be friends or family members

Global health or environmental health: being aware of your environment and how you relate to it

Financial health: how much money you have and what you believe you can achieve financially

The 6 spoke wheel metaphor:

Rather than look at wellness in such broad terms, think of wellness like a wheel with six spokes. In the center of your wheel is the nut that holds all spokes together.  This is represented by your relationship to yourself.  It is at the centre because it relates to what you think, believe and the actions you take that make up the representation that is your current life.

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If you have an unhealthy relationship with yourself – that is, you hate the way you look, your job, etc – it will affect all the other spokes on your wheel. If you don’t believe you’re good enough, you’re career is probably a reflection of this. You probably aren’t working in a field you enjoy. And if you are,  you are likely always feeling like your disappointing or not quite getting to where you want to be.

Remember this: All spokes are bound by your relationship to yourself. If you don’t like yourself, working on your relationship to yourself will have you produce better results in your life.

Here are the components that I believe you need in your life to be “well”:

  1. Self love
  2. Physical health
  3. Financial health
  4. A career you love
  5. An healthy environment
  6. A community you can rely on
  7. Fun!