Teens are busy. School. Social life. Sports. After-school jobs. Throw in building a well-rounded high-school resume, and you’ve arrived at a perfect recipe for stress.

Enter mindfulness.

Mindfulness is all about focusing and being present in the moment. And the means to achieve this is with meditation – probably not an easy sell to a teen. So let’s focus on some facts that might make them converts.

• If students meditate before an exam – and that includes standardized tests — studies confirm they will perform better on the test than students who do not practice mindfulness meditation.
• Mindfulness meditation helps students focus and concentrate on tasks. This even extends to how students listen to – and absorb – what their teachers are saying.
• Anxiety, depression and stress can all be helped through mindfulness meditation.

And the best part: Teens do not have to sit on a cushion for an hour a day to bring mindfulness into their lives. They start slowly, with five minutes, and if they want, work up to 10 to 15 minutes a day. It is the almost daily consistency of meditation that achieves the greatest results – bringing a mindful attitude into every facet of life.

The monkey mind

Our minds wander, often obsessing over what happened yesterday or worrying about what is going to happen in the future. And the same holds true when we meditate.

But here’s the difference: When practicing mindfulness meditation you will notice a thought, make no judgment, and erase the thought from your mind by gently breathing. As Elsa sings in “Frozen,” we learn to “let it go.”

To bring the concept of monkey mind to the life of teens, we ask them to think about school and consider how much of the time they are actually listening to their teacher? Or are they thinking about something else? In most cases, they say they start out listening to the teacher, but soon their thoughts are going in a million different directions.

We also suggest they think about exam week, and the thoughts that are crowding out the important scholastic facts they need for the tests. Many teens are thinking about the future:

• What if I don’t understand the test questions?
• What if I fail?
• What will a bad mark do to my GPA?

Through mindfulness meditation, teens learn to notice when their minds are worrying, often causing anxiety, and how to turn those thoughts off and get down to the business of concentrated studying – without the stress of the “what ifs” taking over.

Mindful communication

Through mindfulness, teens are learning a life skill that is invaluable: How to be an effective communicator, listening to what others are saying without interrupting the person or predetermining what the speaker is saying. That’s not to say they will agree with everything they hear. But they will have the tools to listen, evaluate and then form their own opinions.

They will also learn to become a more powerful speaker, not jumping into conversations to be heard, offering their advice or saying the same thing the person before them said. They will learn to speak with clarity, in an ordered and focused way, to advance their ideas.

Power up our brain

In a previous post we talked about how mindfulness meditation enhances brain power – no studying required! In a nutshell, mindfulness meditation:

• Helps regulate attention, emotion and actions.
• Helps us understand ourselves and the emotions of other people.
• Helps us put things in perspective.

When mindfulness is brought into every aspect of your life it creates a pause, and instead of reacting, practitioners learn to respond. And this is a recipe for success and less stress.