Kids Awareness Series

Stress or anxiety seems to be in everyone’s life in varying degrees.  Stress affects children, adolescents, and adults alike and here is a very easy way to manage your stress.  As a therapist, I see lots and lots of patients even children that are suffering from anxiety and a technique professionals often use is visual imagery.  Visual imagery or visualization is a very easy stress management technique that you can use almost anywhere.  This technique, I recommend to all of the children I see and each person makes up their own little “happy place”.  Here is what you do: 

Make up your own place to relax.  Breathe in deep and exhale slowly before you begin.  Now, picture a scene, you sitting in a hammock facing the ocean.  You lost your cell phone so no one will be calling you.  Notice how warm the sun is and the breeze is blowing and feels very nice.  Stay in this picture for a while and notice that the birds are singing in the trees and the cabana boy just brought you a tall glass of iced tea.  You are totally relaxed and feel terrific.  You continue to breathe in and out slowly and you drift off to sleep for a few seconds and are totally refreshed.

Of course, this is my daydream!!  This may seem hard at first to do since we do not train ourselves to relax, but practice this every day and it will become second nature to you.  Give yourself permission to take a few minutes and practice this every day.  Children can even do this at home before they start their school day and their “daydream” can be changed to something that they enjoy or relaxes them.  Now, have a wonderful day!!