Balancing stress and rest
By Sophie Chang, School Psychologist
Supporting your teenager through stressful assessment periods during the school term can be tough. During this time, it is important to remind ourselves and our teenagers that stress is a normal part of living. This could be a great time to teach them that while stress is normal, not all stress is good. There’s stress that comes from criticising ourselves and beating ourselves up, and there is good stress that helps us achieve excellence. Good stress occurs when we are challenging ourselves with something difficult, but not so difficult that it overwhelms us.
To support our teenagers to achieve excellence and their best performance, we also need to teach them that they need both stress and another key ingredient – rest.
When we are engaging in something that is mentally taxing, such as studying or completing assessments, we need to allow ourselves to take regular breaks. This will allow us to recover from stress and will help us improve in the long run. If we don’t recharge, then our performance will diminish.
Here are some questions that you could go through with your teenagers to help them discover their stress-rest cycle to help them achieve their best:
- Identify something that is in their discomfort zone. It could be studying, training, playing sport, playing an instrument. Something that stresses their body or mind.
- What is their stress and rest interval? See what works best for your adolescent and encourage them to try out different combinations until they find their best fit. For example, they could try 20 mins of work and 5 or 10 mins of rest or maybe 50 mins of work and 10 mins of rest.
- How does your adolescent best switch off? Encourage them to try different types of rest – maybe its reading a book, taking a quick walk, watching a YouTube video or talking to a friend.
- Encourage them to pay attention to what happens when they try this cycle and evaluate which stress-rest cycle works best for them.
Article and image reference: Hayes, L. and Ciarrochi, J., 2020. Your Life, Your Way. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.