Resilience
For teenagers
This section covers some general tips on:
- Boosting how you think to build your resilience
- Some tips on building your academic resilience
- Some tips on developing digital resilience
- An introduction to MINDYOUR5 – a five a day wellbeing plan which, if followed, will help contribute to resilience and positive mental health
Boosting how you think to build your resilience
10 tips from Dr Krause, Consultant Clinical Psychologist, to help you think in a more resilient way:
Sometimes we trap ourselves into thinking in ways that keep us stuck. These thoughts are not only unproductive, they create more patterns of faulty thinking.
Take steps to change. In the free Clear Fear app, we use the help some ‘worry warriors’ to help change negative thoughts.
Here are three common thought traps:
Thinking the worst will happen. This type of thinking doesn’t help build resilience, instead it makes you fearful.
Use the help of the ‘shrinking negative thoughts warrior’ in the Clear Fear app to help defeat this type of thinking.
To do this; take the worst case thought and write it down. Can you shrink it? What’s less drastic? And even less?
Put away the worst case thought and hold onto the fact that it doesn’t have to have a terrible consequence. Now do something positive.
Thinking in an ‘all or nothing way’. This type of thinking doesn’t help build resilience because it isn’t reflective of reality, is inflexible and can stop people from taking steps to make positive change.
Use the help of the ‘in the middle warrior’ in the Clear Fear app to help defeat this type of thinking.
To do this, note down your two extreme thoughts (e.g. I have to do it perfectly. I can’t do it). Generate all the thoughts you can think of that fit in the middle of these two extremes (e.g. I can do it as well as I can and if I fail it doesn’t matter). Put a middle thought into action and test the result.
Overthinking. This type of thinking doesn’t help build resilience because you generate so many possible negative thoughts or ‘what if’ thoughts that you can’t decide on what to do!
Use the help of the ‘what if warrior’ in the Clear Fear app to help defeat this type of thinking.
To help you stop overthinking, try and focus on what’s happening now every time you have a ‘what if’ thought. For example, if you start thinking ‘what if I can’t sleep?’, instead bring your thoughts to the present. You could think ‘I will focus on how tired each part of my body feels now. I will let myself drift off to sleep because I am so tired at the moment.’
There is a saying ‘don’t try to solve problems with the same type of thinking that you used to create them.’ That makes sense. The same type of thinking is like applying the same incorrect formula or using the same incorrect recipe over and over again. It will make you make the same mistake over and over. Use some of the thought trap examples above to make change.
Resilient thinking is about solving a problem. Keep planning for the future even if things aren’t working out. Get some help – there’s no shame in asking for some help to resolve a problem.
Resilient thinking is about seeing failing as a way of learning. Stick the word ‘as yet’ to something you’ve failed in so that you can see it as an opportunity to grow. For example, ‘I can’t do it as yet.’ This means you don’t quit easily but try and try again.
Resilient thinkers keep planning for the future. They are curious about opportunities and open to experiences. Even if they are not sure, they will give opportunities to learn and grow a try.
It’s important to acknowledge successes no matter how small they are. Focus on small wins and remember the process of how you got there – then you have a method of what to do to get there again.
Practice being kind to yourself and to others. Being selfless and generous is the best way to discover the strength of relationships and your own strengths.
In a fast world, being patient isn’t easy. Learning to wait is one of the strongest resilience factors. It will give you time to appreciate and enjoy what you get even more and also help you to be clearer about your purpose – your ‘personal why’.
This is a tough one because all of us are wired to act on our feelings and therefore we believe them. But there are many times when you can ‘feel stupid’ without being stupid or ‘feel guilty’ without having done anything you need to be guilty about. Check out your facts and believe those instead.
Resilience only builds with practice so don’t just try things once and expect them to change – keep trying!
Some tips to build your academic resilience
School life and school work affect us all differently. However, in general, there are some common themes. Many young people tell us that they find balancing the amount of school work with the other things they do difficult. Some find homework annoying or hard. Others find the focus on exams and the experience of exams difficult. Some find friendships at school challenging.
Here are a few tips to help you get through:
Boosting digital resilience
The amount of screen time you spend will sometimes be a sensitive subject especially if you think the adults around you focus too much on this. Be honest with yourself in terms of screen use. Here are some tips for sensible use:
- Monitor how much screen time you actually spend and give yourself a limit per day. According to research more than 5 hours a day is linked with poor mental health
- How much multitasking do you do (for example, watching a movie whilst scrolling your messages)? Stick to one task at a time – it helps you to concentrate and helps you to be more accurate about the time you actually spend on screens
- Try and do something physical in between screen time (have breaks after 45 minutes)
- Set some limits for yourself – for example, no eating and watching a screen
- Set up regular times to see friends or family face to face
- Set up regular activities to do some non-screen activities – for example a card game, board games, chess
- Set up ‘digital detox periods’ – may be a weekend per month?
- Notice how too much screen time affects your mood and learn to manage this by cutting down on screen time and doing something active as soon as you come off a screen and before you see people
MINDYOUR5
Each of the sections above contribute to the MINDYOUR5 model to help you build your resilience.
To be truly resilient you need to look after all of you and that means also looking after your physical health, keeping active in a number of different ways, learning to get the best of your emotions and learning to make the best of the various relationships in your life.
