Teaching Your Teens To Slow Down In Life

Best Ways To Teach Teens To Slow Down In Life

There is a concept in our modern life that being busy is a sign of success. Unfortunately, the emphasis on being busy and “keeping up” has led to various mental health concerns among professionals, such as increased anxiety and depression.

Moreover, operating under the paradigm of a culture that professes to be busy as a virtue can lead to people masking their feelings by being busy. 

These pressures can lead to the development of stress and other issues. Developing coping mechanisms to mitigate these external pressures and eliminate stress from becoming a significant part of your life takes time and an understanding of the root causes.

It’s important then to teach your teenagers the importance of living a well-balanced life that puts activities into proper perspective and provides some time for personal development and mental health. 

Before professional treatment is necessary, you can take steps to develop a healthy balance of activity and relaxation. 

So before you conduct a Google search for a mental health retreat in the Caribbean, learn tactics that will help you prioritize what’s important and provide yourself with plenty of downtimes. As a result, you’ll be happier, the teenagers in your life will be happier, and you will all develop coping mechanisms to handle time crunches more effectively in the future. 

Don’t Confuse Activity For Accomplishment

Legendary college basketball coach John Wooden famously told his teams, “don’t confuse activity for accomplishment.” By stressing the buzz of busyness, what he’s saying is that you could be busy doing nothing, but if you’re busy working toward a goal, that achievement is valuable. 

In our hectic work and life, we tend to put too much stress on doing things without that activity ever reaching an achievement. We’re too busy not to finish something. 

Think of it like this: going grocery shopping without a list. You may browse up and down each aisle, buy some snacks and necessities, and head home only to pick up food to go along the way. Or you could go to the grocery store with a checklist in hand, pick the items you need, head home and prepare the meal you set out to purchase. 

The Busy Versus Productive Trap

Being busy and being productive are two different things entirely. When we’re busy, we have a lot on our plates, often competing with each other for our time and our energy. 

Getting the kids ready for school, getting yourself ready for work, then getting your kids to campus on time while trying to make it to work yourself is busy. 

Productiveness, on the other hand, is the process of using your time and energy efficiently to accomplish a task or goal. 

Teaching your teenagers to recognize the difference between busy and productive activity and accomplishment will give them the tools to prioritize things in life and help them better utilize time-management skills. 

Model Behaviors You Want Your Teen To Adopt

Teaching your teenagers (and any of your kids) what you think are essential life skills is crucial to their health and development, and while you’re messaging maybe with good intentions, you come across as a hypocrite if you don’t practice what you preach. 

Modeling the behaviors and attitudes, you want your children to adopt goes much further than telling them to do something. Whether you know it or not, how you handle adversity, sleep, work-life balance, and other “adult” things is how you shape your kid’s perception of those for later in life. 

For example, plenty of research shows that exercise offers benefits beyond physical fitness, including boosting moods, slowing aging, increasing sleep quality, and minimizing the effects of mental health concerns. 

If you believe that exercise is important, show your teenager by doing it in front of them. Better yet, get them involved and include them in your exercise routines. It may be a great bonding moment and an opportunity for you to model the behaviors you’re trying to impress upon them. 

Teaching your teens to slow down in life is a coping mechanism to handle those moments in life that seem overwhelming. 

Developing a strategy that focuses on slowing down, adopting healthy behaviors like exercise, and understanding the differences between being busy and accomplishing something helps your teenagers develop the crucial time-management skills they’ll need later in life.