As a parent, it’s so easy to get overwhelmed when your child is melting down. Today’s guided meditation is designed to help you build some emotional resiliency so you can COPE.

Meditation is an important component of anxiety work for teens. This week, check out our rainbow aura meditation, plus I’ve recorded the script so you can just lay back and relax!

College and highschool students have to deal with a lot of stress.

School stress, performance stress, life stress, future stress… It’s a lot to handle.

And when you’re dealing with stress, it’s really tough to know how to let it go.

Stress is important. It’s a healthy emotion.

It lets us know that we have things that need to be addressed. It can motivate us to get things done. But at a certain point, that stress reaches a place where it’s not longer healthy. It starts to get in our way. It can even have an impact on our health, physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Today’s meditation is focused on letting go of stress and over-control.

Meditation is great for kids, teens, and college students with anxiety. It’s important to help you let go of control.

Meditation has many, many benefits.

And a big one that we focus on here at Compassionate Counseling St. Louis is stress reduction.

When meditation is used as a relaxation tool, we want to focus on our physical clues that our body is relaxed.

This warm light guided meditation is great for anxious kids and overwhelmed adults.

And like many meditations, it can apply to anyone who is really noticing a lot of stress being held in their body.

Games work as anxiety treatment and anger management, too.

As we discussed last week, when we use play interventions, we focus on three things:

1. Building our relationship

2. Following the rules

3. Practicing self-regulation

Games provide us a great opportunity to help model rule following, to process frustration as it arises, to build self regulation, and to build up our parent/child relationship.

Below, you’ll find 25 of our favorite games to incorporate at home, including a few that we use as child therapists...

Internal emotions and external expression:

We all experience emotions internally and express them in slightly different ways from one another. We all have our inside emotional experiences and our outside displays of frustration, anger, and sadness.

When we experience a spike in emotions, it helps us know we may need to take the time to Stop and Think, using our Wizard Brain. Otherwise, our Lizard Brain might take over, leading to an explosive reaction.

Our Lizard Brain wants to react right away (it is in charge of fight, flight, and freeze, of course) – so if you notice yourself feeling heated, your Lizard Brain may tell you that you should explode and yell. However, if you take the time to stop and think “will I get in trouble if I explode?” you can make a wise decision, even when you start feeling upset.

How to help kids clue into their emotions:

Draw an outline of a body. It doesn’t have to be perfect! Try to get a head and arms and legs in there, and call it good.

Don’t judge yourself!

Many people report experiencing panic attacks about panic attacks. Of course it makes sense to wish that you didn’t have to experience them. Or to wish that you were different. But when we judge ourselves, we can make this an unhealthy cycle - the panic, the guilt about the panic, the panic about the guilt about the panic… it’s a panic cycle! So break the cycle, and be kind to yourself. And practice your steps, even before you need them.

The more tips the better, right?

Mindfulness, yoga, and scheduling it in. Relaxation is great, but it's important to practice throughout the day. When you operate with anxiety, the baseline of your stress level is typically pretty high. You may have a small "window of tolerance," meaning stressors that seem small to others feel very big to you. So, let's look at my top three recommendations, which I share with all of my clients.

For anxious kids, teens, and college students, it can be very difficult to fall asleep at night.

Not falling asleep means being exhausted the next morning. And guess what happens the next morning? You're too tired to adequately respond to all of the stressors during your day. It's a vicious cycle - and it's super, super common. 

One of the ways to relax is to build up a regular relaxation practice.

This means incorporating regular exercise and healthy eating ALONG with relaxation practice, including breathing exercises, muscle relaxation, and visualization.

Managing anxiety is tough.

And it can be hard to focus on anything else when it feels like anxiety is at the forefront of your mind. It gets in the way of schoolwork, family time, stuff with friends or romantic partners. 

If you deal with anxiety on a regular basis, you also probably know how it builds over time. Sometimes it builds slowly, until you suddenly realize that you're way too stressed out. Other times, it seems to skyrocket and you're left dealing with a very unexpected panic attack.

We've come to the end of our 6 week series, so now is a great time for reflection. What was your purpose in picking up this mindfulness practice? Was it to practice anxiety management through meditation? Were you looking for tools to help your child with their anger? Figure out what the root of this was. And, while we can't change people around us - and we can't change what our children do or don't do - we can demonstrate healthy listening and coping skills for them.

Our minds are always churning out lots of thoughts. So it can be helpful, during a meditation practice, to table these thoughts for later. In this week's post, I discuss a visualization tool: thought bubbles. When you allow your thoughts to drift away, you can focus more on your stillness, calming your brain and your body. A critical tool for kids, teens, and parents!

Week 3 and we're halfway there! Today we practice mindful breathing - a fundamental skill so basic you may think you already know it, but trust me - there's room for improvement. Also included in this week's lesson, tips for training your children how to intergrate mindful breathing into their life as well. 

Week 2 of our mindfulness series, and we're exploring how to scan your body for emotions. It's important to be aware of where you hold stress, anxiety, or frustration, as everybody's body is different. And when you're able to identify these trigger points, it's much easier to find 1. where you should focus during your relaxation practice and 2. where you need to check in to make sure your emotions feel controllable.