What are your goals for 2018?
We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!
What Is This “Mindfulness” Thing Anyway?
We’ve used the words “mindfulness mediation” a lot on this site, and perhaps you’re curious about what it means and what it is all about. We found this really neat short video for you that explains it quite well.
Five to ten minutes a day! That’s a pretty easy, cool brain exercise that can help you and your adolescent change the way you interact with the world around you.
Would you give this a try for a week? Would you do it with your adolescent? Tell us what you think in the comments! Give some suggestions for how this best fits into your life!
How to Fast from Social Media
Sometimes you may feel as though your adolescent lives on their phone/tablet/computer. Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, on and on! Everyone wants their attention!
You give likes, you get likes, your phone buzzes, little red numbers come up on the apps letting you know about every interaction, every moment someone may notice you.
Are you giving yourself time to just be you? For them to just be them?
Self-care: Sleep matters, too!
How can we take care of others if we don’t—or won’t—take care of ourselves?
Flight attendants instruct us that, in the event of crisis, we must put our own oxygen masks on before trying to help anyone else. It seems counterintuitive, but it’s so true! Self-care is all about accepting ourselves and being grateful for what we have—rather than always wanting things faster, better, more.
One simple but important component of taking care of ourselves is taking care of our sleep.
How to Help Get Rid of Holiday Anxiety
The SOVA Project is happy to feature this blog post written by one in our team of fantastic SOVA Ambassadors—these are young people who help create meaningful blog posts for us to share.
The holidays are a great time to kick back, reunite with family, and hang out with friends. However, along with all the fun, the holidays can be an anxious time for many people. Because of the social nature of the holidays, if you have depression it can often feel tiring to act happy all the time around family. If you have anxiety, it can be difficult to be in long social situations day after day and find alone time to recharge.
We’re bound to feel some of that holiday nervousness, but there are resources and support available to those of us who would like to alleviate at least some of our holiday anxiety. Here are three situations that you may relate to in feeling nervousness towards the season.
Happy Holidays
The SOVA Project wishes you a very happy and peaceful holiday season.
Do you celebrate this time of the year? If so, how? Do you have any specific family or cultural traditions that are special? We’d love to hear in the comments below!
The app that lets teens blur their faces to share their stories
In the past few years, many people have benefited from the innovation of apps and social media tools to improve mental healthcare and bring it to more people. One new app called Huddle came out of the experience of its founder, Dan Blackman, in the small town where he grew up.
In Blackman’s hometown, everybody knew each other. This type of tightly knit community can provide great support on its own. On the other hand, if you’re afraid of your small community judging you, it can make it harder to ask for the help you need. Blackman’s father suffered from addiction to alcohol and didn’t get the help he needed due to the stigma in his community.
So Blackman invented Huddle.
Continue reading The app that lets teens blur their faces to share their stories
How Facebook Tries To Prevent Suicide
Healthcare professionals and government officials have been confronting suicide for years by creating various policies to prevent self-harm and suicide. Now, social-media companies like Facebook are taking part in the fight against suicide—by using artificial intelligence (AI).
Companies that run social media platforms are becoming more and more concerned about their users’ risks for digital self-harm. For example, this year Facebook invested in a form of AI that reads the text in posts to look for individual users’ emotional distress and potential for self-harm. The software also looks for users’ comments such as “Are you OK?” and “Can I help?”—these can indicate that someone has suicidal thoughts.
How Teens Cope With Digital Stress
Teens live with their phones in their pockets, and this has created tons of entertainment for you—but it has also created stress. Teens deal with cyber-bullying, digital self-harm, fake accounts, and many other problems that can contribute to anxiety and depression.
Most research on digital stress focuses on coping with social stress and cyber-bullying. But other online problems also exist, including digital impersonation, smothering, and hacking.
A super interesting article in the Journal of Adolescent Research looked at hundreds of teens’ posts online. They found out five ways that teens cope with “digital stress” and reduce their anxiety when they scroll through their feeds. Here’s a rundown of these strategies:
Why Not Ask For Help?
Have you or your child ever wanted to talk to a therapist or psychologist about difficult feelings, but hesitated? If you have ever felt this way, you’re not alone. The reasons for this hesitation are sometimes rooted in people’s backgrounds, and culture can be one of those influences.
What is culture?
“Culture” can have a lot of different meanings. One understanding of culture is that it’s the common ideas, traditions, and behaviors of a certain group of people.