Transforming Stress for Teens: The Heartmath Solution for Staying Cool Under Pressure

It’s stressful being a teen! In Transforming Stress for Teens, leaders from the world-renowned Institute of HeartMath and Clemson University’s Youth Learning Institute team up to teach overwhelmed and stressed-out teens how to use HeartMath skills—proven-effective tools and techniques to help you manage daily stress and anxiety, and develop resilience by managing emotion.

The teen years are a time of significant change and growth, and teens face numerous stressors like homework overload, conflict with friends and family, balancing school and other responsibilities, and dealing with the all-too-common feeling of being left out or of not belonging. Emotions can “drain your battery,” and many teens struggle when it comes to managing their everyday stress. Some withdraw or even turn to destructive behaviors in an effort to feel better.

Following the success of Transforming Stress, this book is the first to provide teens with the life-changing, proven-effective HeartMath skills for reducing stress. Using these practical evidence-based concepts and techniques, this book will help you manage stress by showing you how to manage your emotions. And with these emotion regulation skills, like the relaxing heart-breathing technique, you’ll feel calmer, be more confident, think more clearly, bounce back from challenging situations, and enjoy life with a new understanding of what’s really important to you.

Transforming Stress for Teens will help you recognize the mental, emotional, and physical impact of stress, and guide you toward finding balance, clarity, and self-assurance with the proven HeartMath tools. When you feel better, you do better—this book will show you how.

Rollin McCraty, PhD, is director of research at HeartMath® Institute Research Center. McCraty, a professor at Florida Atlantic University, is a psychophysiologist whose interests include the physiology of emotion. One of his primary areas of focus is the mechanisms by which emotions influence cognitive processes, behavior, and health. Findings from this research have been incorporated by HeartMath® in the development of simple, user-friendly mental and emotional self-regulation tools and techniques. People of all ages and cultures can use these tools and techniques in the moment to relieve stress and break through to greater levels of personal balance, stability, creativity, intuitive insight, and fulfillment. McCraty has written extensively and been widely published in his areas of scientific interest. He has been interviewed for many feature articles in publications that include Prevention, Natural Health, Men's Fitness, and American Health magazines. He has appeared in television segments for CNN Headline News, ABC World News Tonight, ABC’s Good Morning America, NBC’s Today Show, PBS’s Body & Soul, and the Discovery Channel. In addition, he has been featured in many documentary films, including I Am, The Truth, The Joy of Sox, The Power of the Heart, Solar Revolution, and The Living Matrix, among others.

Sarah Moor is a HeartMath® master trainer and mentor. She is the instructor for HeartMath®’s coach/mentor certification training, assists in program design and development, and coordinates and mentors special HeartMath® projects. She has mentored thousands of individuals in learning how to incorporate the HeartMath® System into their daily lives.

Jeff Goelitz is currently program developer, senior trainer, and education specialist with the nonprofit HeartMath® Institute. He regularly consults with education professionals, mental health specialists, and parents around the United States and Canada to help improve the well-being of youth, parent/child communication, and classroom climate and performance. In the last fifteen years, he has created and contributed to numerous educational curricula and programs designed to improve social and emotional learning, including The College De-Stress Handbook.

Stephen W. Lance, MS, has over twenty years of experience in the field of youth development. Lance serves as executive director of Clemson University’s Youth Learning Institute, which serves over 25,000 youth annually in diverse programs ranging from innovative schools, group homes, camping programs, and academic field study experiences.

Foreword writer Steve Sawyer, LCSW, CSAC, is clinical director and cofounder of New Vision Wilderness Therapy. He is a dual-licensed clinical social worker and certified substance abuse counselor, and a nationally recognized trainer in somatic trigger release techniques, Brainspotting, traumatic memory reprocessing, and HeartMath®.