Life as a teenager is often filled with hurdles, challenges, and setbacks. Learning to bounce back from these difficult circumstances is essential to living a healthy and fulfilling life, and building teen resilience is the path to taking your challenges in stride.
Resilience training for teens can teach you how to take a different perspective, see your failures as stepping stones on the path to success, and improve your mental health and well-being along the way.
Looking for a way to bounce back from challenges? Reach out to Project Eden at Horizon to learn more.
How to Build Resilience
Building resilience is a process, and ultimately comes as the result of lived experience with challenging times. No matter if you’ve been sidetracked due to substance use recently or in the past, there are a few things you can start doing now to improve your resiliency for the future and have an easier time overcoming life’s challenges.
Start with Building Healthy Relationships
Having a social support network is one of the best things you can do now to manage challenges better in the future. Having a healthy and supportive group of friends or working with a mental health professional allows you to share your difficulties with others, take in different perspectives, and find help when you need it.
When you have a strong base of social connections, you’ll learn that you don’t need to go through difficult times alone. You’ll have friends and family members to turn to, who can support you in overcoming your challenges.
Find Healthy Coping Strategies to Manage Stress That Work for You
The everyday challenges of life can quickly become too much to bear if you don’t have a healthy set of coping strategies to help you find relief — mental health conditions can manifest if these issues are not addressed. Aside from keeping up with your physical health, some healthy habits to help you deal with difficult emotions or experiences include:
- Exercise
- Journaling
- Music or art
- Meditation
- Deep breathing exercises
All of these coping skills can support resilience. They show you that you can get through difficult situations unscathed and keep moving forward towards your goals.
Practice Self-Compassion
People make mistakes. In your teenage years, these mistakes can seem like they define you, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Practicing self-compassion is permitting yourself to not be perfect, to recognize that sometimes trying your best is all you can do — and that you are not your mistakes.
Adopt a Growth Mindset
A growth mindset is a term psychologists use to describe people who believe that they can improve with effort, that they can learn from their mistakes, and that their abilities are not fixed, but learned.
Learning to adopt a growth mindset is the process of putting these beliefs into action. If you fall short of a goal, think about how you can improve your chances of success next time. If you make a mistake, consider how you could’ve acted differently that would have prevented that mistake from happening.
When you recognize that the road to success is often paved with small failures, you’ll have a much easier time bouncing back from hard times.
Keep Things in Perspective
Everybody goes through stressful situations from time to time. But bad times end, and in the broader context of your life, they may not be as overwhelming as they appear while you’re in it.
Think of the difficult times you’ve had in the past, and how you’ve managed to work through them before. Think of the good times you’ve had as well, and how impactful those situations have been in the course of your life.
By taking a long-term perspective, you can stop yourself from hyper-focusing on the here and now and start working to solve problems for yourself in the future. Keep in mind that engaging in counseling is a great way to help you keep things in perspective, or to guide you toward your goals.
How Building Teen Resilience Improves Your Life
Building resilience isn’t just a tool to help you now, but a skill that can support you for decades to come. Whatever you want most in life – whether that be a career, a relationship, to create, or simply to find peace – you’ll be faced with challenges that stand in your way.
If you can nurture resilience now, you’ll learn to not only overcome these challenges but welcome them as a part of the process.
Are you in need of support for meeting and overcoming challenges? Contact Project Eden at Horizon to learn more.
