• All youth experience challenges at times.
• Common stressors during adolescence include:
• Increasing demands in school
• Social relationships
• Forming an identity and a sense of self
• Emerging independence

• Teens respond to stress with different emotions such as sadness, anxiety, frustration, and irritability

• The Youth Mindful Awareness Program (YMAP) teaches skills that:
• Help teens manage moods
• Build resilience
• Promote well-being

Welcome to the Youth Mindful Awareness Program (YMAP)

Teens, ages 12- to 17-years old*, are eligible to participate

*And living in the states of California, Illinois, or Tennessee

• Teens will have access to a program for managing stress and building resilience
• Complete questions about their health, mood, and stress

Have you ever found yourself thinking about a tough situation or bad experience and you can’t stop thinking about it? Such thinking can distract you from your friends and relationships, interfere with schoolwork, prevent you from resting at night, or cause you distress.

When we just try to push thoughts and feelings out of our mind, the thoughts don’t go away or may even get worse. Instead, writing about our negative experiences can help us deal with and process our difficult emotions in healthy ways. Some people also say that it is helpful for them to write about their positive feelings.

There are many ways to write about our thoughts and feelings. Expressive writing is a technique that can help people understand and deal with their emotions. Research has shown that practicing expressive writing can benefit our health and well-being. Expressive writing can improve mood, reduce anxiety and physical distress, increase resilience, and improve our ability to pay attention and concentrate.

In addition to these benefits, expressive writing can help people find meaning in their experiences and lean new things about themselves. For example, writing about a stressful experience allows us to identify it as a problem and uncover meaning in it. First, we recognize that something is bothering us. Then we translate that negative experience into words, and it forces us to organize our thoughts and create a story of what has happened.

It can be helpful to write about a wide range of topics, including:
• Stressful experiences from the past
• Current or recent minor problems such as failing an exam or disagreement with a family member or peer
• Positive experiences that require rethinking who we are and where we are headed in the future, such as starting a new job, going to a new school, starting a romantic relationship.

• Expressive writing has a positive effect on mental health because it offers a safe way to disclose unpleasant emotions that were previously bottled up.

• Avoiding or inhibiting emotions can lead to psychological distress, making our body tense and our cognitions impaired.

• When we acknowledge, express, and process blocked emotions, it reduces the physiological work of inhibition, gradually lowering the overall stress on the body, which helps us feel better.

• The benefits of expressive writing can be explained by brain-related changes.
• Common stressors during adolescence include:
• Our emotional states are controlled by the right prefrontal cortex.
• When this part of the brain “turns on,” other parts of the brain that are related to strong negative emotions, such as the amygdala, turn off.
• So, when we put our deep emotional experiences into language and words, it facilitates our brain’s capacity to help us manage our emotional states.