Relaxation techniques for adolescents

Adolescence is a time of great changes, both physical and emotional. These changes push the youngest to quickly develop adaptation strategies 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, as in the school environment, even seriously interfering in their mental stability. Irritable behaviors in schools usually translate into complicated treatment among teachers and adolescents, in the family environment a similar phenomenon can occur and both feed the same anxiety that generates them.

To avoid reaching these situations, simple can be put into practice Relaxation techniques. These exercises are specifically designed for adolescents, can reduce anxiety and thus avoid emotional explosions so common in them. In addition, these techniques can help control nerves in circumstances that are stressful. If you want to know more to learn the best Relaxation techniques for adolescents, We invite you to continue reading this Psychology-online article.

1. Guided relaxation for teenagers
2. Muscle relaxation exercises
3. Diaphragmatic breathing exercises
4. Jacobson progressive muscle relaxation
5. Mindfulness or conscious attention

Guided relaxation for teenagers

It is difficult to communicate with a teenager to kindly invite you to participate in a guided meditation session. The key to this will be to accompany you or provide guidelines to exercise meditation independently.

Guided meditation exercises for adolescents

First, it is essential to be in a Comfortable and noise free space that can bother us. We must sit and close our eyes to start visualizing situations or places that transmit calm us. These techniques will serve us mentally away from the stressful factors surrounding the adolescent.

Once visualized what transmits calm (a relaxing beach, a forest, a lake ...) we must keep your eyes closed. Slowly, we can enter those imaginary places, following a leisurely 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. See us in this way, you can activate parts of the cerebral cortex that provide real relaxation. To finish the exercise, we must open your eyes slowly and keep your breath calm. We can see how the feeling of calm is maintained and 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 serve to calm the stress and anxiety of the adolescent. Are simpler to apply Since the guidelines are more basic, it is not about visualizing but also learning concrete patterns of breathing or muscle relaxation. These techniques have also proven effective to sleep and get good sleep hygiene.

Muscle relaxation exercises can be applied in educational centers during the subject of Physical Education.In fact, it has been shown that the practice of these techniques after a physical education session achieves stabilize the heart rate of adolescents very effectively¹

Diaphragmatic breathing exercises

We do not usually pay attention to the way we breathe during our day to day. Something as vital as breathing, can help us to achieve an optimal state of relaxation in the adolescent.

Diaphragmatic breathing is based on paying attention where we put the air when inhale. If we don't think about it, we usually breathe so that we only use the top of the thorax. However, to relax, we must try to drive the inhaled air towards the low zone of the lungs.

It starts inspiring very slowly, letting the air penetrate the lungs to the abdomen. While we inspire, we notice how the abdomen swells. For breathing to be as relaxing as possible, we can make a mental image of a balloon that, slowly and to the rhythm of our breathing, swells. Then we expire, imagining how that balloon gets unbuttled. We repeat this breathing and visualization exercise several times until we notice.

Diaphragmatic breathing exercises are very simple and, in turn, useful for anxiety and to relax adolescents.

Jacobson 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 feel or lay down and indicate the sequence of the exercise until the complete relaxation. The steps to achieve a correct progressive muscle relaxation are very easy to apply:

• First it is The voltage-disming phase, In it, we must tighten a part of the body and then relax it during 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 verify that all the muscles are relaxed.
• Mental relaxation: Once the main muscle groups have been relaxed, it is time to pay attention to the mind, in this phase you can use the guided meditation exercises that we have previously commented in this article.

Mindfulness or conscious attention

Although he has many years old, this therapy has currently spread throughout the world and, recently, in clinical psychology.

Mindfulness (or full attention therapy) is a practice that is based on becoming aware of everything that surrounds us at every moment, paying attention to internal stimuli and the sensations that our body transmits us. To do an exercise based on mindfulness, we close our eyes and We concentrate on all the sounds we hear: A door that opens, the neighbor's steps, a dog barking ... Then we focus on ours.

The benefits of this type of practices are multiple, it has been shown that the symptoms of stress and anxiety have calmed down. In addition, today, its effect on other mental illnesses such as depression and borderline personality disorder are being studied.

This article is merely informative, in psychology-online we have no 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.