Happiness Class

I think that there should be a class in high school on how to be happy. It isn't something you can search for and eventually find or put in a jar to take out when you want it. Being happy is a decision. There is so much depression, sadness, hopelessness among young people and no one really knows how to get this turned around. Here is my two sense on the topic


There are many reasons that can lead to a persons unhappiness; bad experiences, unbalanced hormones, vitamin and mineral deficiency, being placed in unfortunate situations by choice or not, poor health and mental illness. So some people may have a more difficult time with this than others, but every can benefit.

Of course there are times that people are sad during the loss of a loved one or finding out very bad news, there is time for this sadness and a process to go through natural feelings during hard times. After taking time to go through this pain, you can decide when its time to move on a be happy, sometimes you have to allow yourself to be happy instead of holding on to the sadness and feeling like you shouldn't be happy because that would mean you no longer love or remember a loved one. It is ok to be happy.


Each individual has to make a decision whether they want to be happy or not, it's that simple. Well it sounds simple anyway but it really take work, like continuously exercising to establish muscles. Once you decide to be happy that is the first step. It's sometimes enticing to stay miserable and that's just the way you want to be, then you will be. Make the choice, be happy.


At first you will feel like a phony but tell tell yourself that you are happy, smile often and keep reminding yourself that you are happy. If you have bad things happening all around you, take many deep breaths and smile despite the bad things. When you are alone, laugh. laugh out loud even if it feels forced. keep reminding yourself you are happy and you deserve to be happy. This isn't easy and takes a lot of hard work.


There will be times when you feel like you just can't make even force a smile, you are so sad and depressed that you just want to scream cry and bang your head against the wall. So give yourself 10-15 minutes and scream, cry, have a big tantrum. And then stop wipe away the tears and smile. Push those negative thoughts out of your mind with all your will. Think of positive things, let yourself day dream about awesome things even if they aren't real. Imagine you just found a big bag of money on your door step and what you would buy with it. Think about a dream vacation you would take if you had the time or money. Anything positive that will help get your mind off of being sad and filled with despair.


This will get easier those more you do it, your hard work and focus will pay off. As you continue to grow your happiness you can shorten your crying tantrums to 5 to 10 minutes and eventually you will be able to manage your breakdowns to only a few minutes once in a while.


Focus on positive things in your life at the moment or things that you are thankful for. Gratitude is a big part of growing your happiness. Even if your house burns down, your best friend dies and your hair starts falling out, there are still things to be grateful for. But you have 2 legs and 2 arms, I'd say appreciate the things you can do like walk, swim or run. If you are very sick and have no friends or family, you be thankful for a bed to sleep in or pain relieving medication. You may have to stretch but you can find something. Write down 4 or 5 things each day that you are thankful for.


Anti-depressant drugs: these are handed out like candy! And while it is sometimes helpful if you have tried and tried to pull yourself out of a funk for a long time but you just can't get out, you may need a few months on an anti-depressant to get started on your journey. But if you do go this route, make it a point to work toward getting better and getting off the drugs. These should be used only as more of a last resort method.


The brain is an amazing organ, through your hard work of pushing out the negative thoughts and replacing them with positive ones you can actually re- route the wiring in your brain. It will become easier and easier to focus on the positive. The synaptic plasticity in your brain is the ability of synapses to strengthen or weaken over time, meaning you can train your brain to what ever you want it to believe.


We always hear that depression is a chemical imbalance. Sometimes this is due to nutritional deficiencies or hormonal imbalance. In plastic there are BPA's that can mimic estrogen in the body and that in itself can throw a person out of whack. There are natural ways to try and combat this as well. Maca route can be found in powder or capsule form and it is a great way to help your body balance out your hormones on their own. It doesn't happen over night it takes a few months. There are some good vitamin supplements but just because you are taking a multi-vitamin doesn't mean you can't be deficient. There are certain types of of vitamins that aren't absorbed well in the body (for instance Magnesium Oxide is not a good supplemental magnesium to take I'd take Magnesium citrate or gluconate). But that is another conversation all together.


My primary focus in this Happy Lesson is more on understanding that happiness is not found after some lengthy search or captured suddenly. Happiness isn't for the rich or extra lucky people. Happiness is and can be for everyone at any time, all you have to do is decide that you are Happy. Plant the seed and allow it to grow.

Family Time

As a teenager friends and boyfriends are a pretty important priority but it's also important to make sure to have time with family, as well as time for family to get to know the friends in their teenagers life. Some kids grow up with the same friends since grade school and parents have known them and even their families for many years, but the new friends should be introduced and welcomed into the family as well.  It's important not only for parents to know who their kids are hanging out with but also as important for the friends to feel comfortable spending time with and getting to know their friends parents and siblings. It allows for better communication, less time spent worrying, less miss communication, and a better understanding of where everyone is coming from.  

Of course its not very cool to make your friends come to meet your parents, little lone hang out with them. It shouldn't have to be a set time that everyone has to sit down together, there should be casual invites to dinner or just allowing the teen to have their friends over often.  It may seem like more trouble to allow your teenager to have slumber parties that keep you up half the night and mess up the house, but these are actually opportunities to get to meet and know the people they hang out with. It would be worrisome if there your teen didn't want to bring friends around and kept secret friendship, that may indicate there are issues that the friend was not a good influence.  

It is so important to make sure you aren't making so many rules that as a parent you are pushing your teen away.  There have to be boundaries and rules but the harder it is for your teen to try and follow tons of rules, the less likely they are going to try to follow them. By this point in their life you have to have a bit of faith that your kids have learned from you how to make decent decisions and will even when they don't, they will learn.  

The forced family time isn't always well received but sometimes its got to be done. Say Every Sunday night is a sit down family dinner, and it sometimes has to be enforced. It won't kill the kid to have dinner.  Everyone's lives get so busy and it's hard to find the time where everyone can be together and no one ends up having to sacrifice something, but both the teen and the parents have to learn that giving up small things to spend time together will have a bigger impact overall. I wouldn't make my teenager skip a school dance or a friends Bar Mitzfah but maybe they can go to a slumber party an hour late in needed. It's important for parents to show their teenagers that they are willing to make compromises too, for example, if you have softball all summer almost every night of the week perhaps you need to skip a game here and there to show your teen that they are most important.   

Be there when your kids have a break up or get into a fight with friends. And teens need to learn that their friends can take a back seat from time to time so they can soak up some seemingly dorky family love, because there will be a time that your family will be there for you when your friends aren't able to. Family keeps everyone grounded and reminds us that there are people that will be there for us no matter what. 

Education

Learning is so important every single day of your entire life. The brain does best when you are learning new stuff all of the time. During a teenagers life there are many changes, stresses and emotions that is is tough to focus and take in all of the good knowledge being provided by school. It's also important to remember that everyone learns differently, just because some one isn't getting good grades doesn't mean that they have any less capability of learning, just perhaps they learn a different way. Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein for example weren't very good in school at all, but they were brilliant nonetheless.


So as parents lets remember to realize that it is important to get a wide base of general knowledge and earn a diploma but at the same time we need to help our kids find area that they are good at and have interest in. Successful can mean that a person does well in school, gets good grades and goes on to use their education in the future and that is wonderful for those that are meant to do that. But, there are so many other areas of success and we can't make our children/young adults feel like they are failures just because they don't get good grades. We have to encourage our kids to seek out those passions and use their creativity, it is so important to know how to think outside the box and utilize different perspectives to solve problems in real life. It is so important to promote individual self growth to reach their maximum potential rather than stuffing them all in a big general box that stifles their talents.


Teenagers and young adults need to understand the importance that society as put on achieving an education and earning a diploma. As hard as it is sometimes to get up early, to spend a good amount of time studying and push yourself to achieve difficult goals, it is important to get the most out of school as possible. For one, society puts a lot of stock in having a diploma and its difficult to manage the rest of life without it for that reason alone. Secondly, a stable base of knowledge can be beneficial in achieving your true passion, the more you know the more options you'll have.  It's like a pyramid is stable and supports the entire structure all the way to the top because it has a nice spread out base, its not very sturdy to only have one leg to stand on.

The Big Picture

Every Adult has been a teenager at one time and most have forgotten all of the challenges that went along with it.  Where is the balance with trying to establish some independence, and still being confined by so many restrictions from parents, school and the law?

From a scientific perspective the Brain is the key to figuring out the balance between Adulthood and pre-adulthood. It’s been proven that the brain continues to change until a person is in their early 20’s. The last part to develop is the area that helps with reasoning, decision making, and emotions. The immaturity of the brain can give reason for the extra restriction placed on teens.  This is also the time that the teen brain is so vulnerable and can have affect on them for the rest of their life, depending on the decisions that are made. Therefore as a parent there is every reason to worry and set boundaries for teenagers, but as important as the neurology of the teen brain is, in my opinion we have to remember there is more to keeping the balance in the life of a teen. We have to look at factors such as self awareness, self esteem, current and past relationships, economic situation, hormonal imbalances, life altering changes, and the up-bringing in the earlier years of life.