One of the best practices for parents of teens with mental health challenges is for the parents to take care of themselves first. One of the most common metaphors is that when we’re on an airplane, we have to put the oxygen mask on ourselves first, before we can help anyone else.
And parenting any adolescent comes with its own set of stresses!
One way to do take care of yourself is to create a day-to-day multidimensional picture of what your anxiety looks like and how to manage it.
Check out the free app called “Self-Help for Anxiety Management”—or, the SAM app.
It’s a free, relatively new app that gives you all kinds of ways to measure your anxiety and work with modalities that help you reduce it.
Its graphic interface looks cool, as well! Little slider buttons help you measure feelings, thoughts, physical sensations, and your desire to avoid things you fear.
These help you understand whether you’re someone who experiences anxiety more as feelings that interfere with your functioning, or as worrying thoughts, or as sensations in your body.
You can upload self-help tools to a “toolkit” to help you manage these different manifestations of anxiety.
SAM is backed by a research team at the University of West England in Bristol, England. It’s top-rated on iTunes and Android, and also on some health-related websites that track helpful apps.
What tools do you use to monitor your stress? Let us know in the comments!