15 Mindfulness Activities for Teens

The life of a teenager is a busy one, often filled with stress, anxiety, and big emotional highs and lows.

Teenage depression, anxiety disorders, and other mental health issues are often a common side effect of the changes teenagers go through, the growth and challenges they face.

One of the best ways to manage mental health and reduce the risk of depression and anxiety is through mindfulness practice. In fact, helping your teenager to be more mindful during their adolescent years will arm them with the tools they need to be a much healthier and happier adult. It’s one of the best things you can do for them!

In this post, we’ll take a look at mindfulness for teens. We’ll explore what mindfulness is, what benefits it can offer, and how it can improve your teenager’s life. We’ll then share a long list of powerful, mood-boosting, stress- and anxiety-reducing mindfulness exercises for teens that can be absolute game changers for their emotion regulation and self awareness.

What Is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is described as “awareness towards the contents of one’s own mind in the present moment.”[1]

It’s a cognitive skill that requires development through frequent practice, but once developed, it can offer a wide range of physical, mental, and emotional health benefits (see the next section).

A simple explanation of mindfulness is that it’s a meditative practice that encourages you to become more aware of the things you’re feeling and sensing, but without any judgment or interpretation of those feelings and physical sensations. You understand your mind and body better, but you also relax, let go of anxiety and stress, and engage with yourself and the world you live in much more effectively.

Benefits of Mindfulness for Teenagers

Research has shown a lot of very impressive mindfulness benefits, including [2]: 

• Less rumination (repetitive and sometimes obsessive thinking about negative feelings, events, or situations)
• Better anxiety and stress management
• Improved mood
• Enhanced working memory
• Greater focus and concentration
• Increased cognitive flexibility
• Decreased emotional reactivity
• Higher satisfaction in relationships
• Increased self-insight, morality, and intuition
• More effective modulation of fear
• Increased immune response
• Decreased psychological distress
• Lower risk of depression
• Faster cognitive processing
• Decreased task effort
• Improved sleep

Suffice it to say, mindfulness is a truly amazing practice that can improve your teenager’s well-being in so many ways.

The problem is: to learn mindfulness takes work and practice. Like most mental skills, it’s not something you can develop overnight, but requires consistent effort and time invested.

15 Teens Mindfulness Activities to Try Today

Thankfully, the mindfulness techniques below will help your teenager build the habit of putting mindfulness into practice throughout their day as part of their daily routine.

The more they work at it, the greater the benefits to their mind, body, and emotions.

Mindfulness Breathing Exercises

Regulating your breathing is one of the best ways to relax your mind and body and regulate your mood.

Deep, controlled breathing shuts down your sympathetic nervous system (which speeds up heart rate and breathing rate), and causes your parasympathetic nervous system to slow your whole body down. The simple act of taking slow breaths will trigger relaxation, improve emotional regulation, and reduce stress.

Practice mindful breathing with these two exercises:

• Deep breathing. Breathe in for a full count of six, hold for a count of three, then slowly exhale for a count of four. Repeat this for 2 minutes.
• Box breathing. Inhale for a count of four, hold for a count of four, exhale for a count of four, and hold again for a count of four. Repeat this for two minutes.

These relaxation breathing techniques, practiced regularly in a comfortable, calm, quiet place, can calm an anxious mind and stressed body right down, helping you to relax even in the middle of a hectic day at school or work.

They’ll also help you to grow more aware of how you breathe throughout the day, making it easier to notice if your breathing grows accelerated or shallow (signs of stress or anxiety).

Guided Meditation for Teens

Guided meditations are a highly effective mindful activity to help beginners practice meditation and bring mindfulness into their lives even with no prior experience.

With a guided meditation, you’ll simply be listening and following along to the pre-recorded meditation in the podcast, YouTube video, or Spotify playlist, or health-oriented platforms like Zonia.

All you have to do is sit there and follow the instructions in the meditation—be it visualizing a scene in nature, paying attention to your body, or focusing on a happy memory.

Note: Meditation doesn’t have to be an hours-long practice. Short meditations of 5, 10, or 20 minutes can have the same positive effects, and are far easier to fit into your busy day. Find short guided meditations that you can easily follow along with, and do a few of them whenever you have a hole in your daily schedule. 

Visualization Practices

Visualization and meditation often go hand in hand. Visualization techniques involve mentally picturing some mental image or scene, engaging all of your senses—sight, sound, smell, touch, even taste—to make them feel as real and vivid as possible.

Visualization may be easier for people with active imaginations, whereas teenagers who are less mentally creative may struggle to picture very detailed settings. The great thing about visualization practices for anxiety is that you can include as much or as little detail as works for you.

The simple act of imagining these locations and staying focused on the setting (blocking out the day and troubled thoughts) will be amazing for clearing your mind and relaxing your body.

Mindful Journaling and Writing

Mindful journaling can be an absolute game-changer for those who like to do rather than simply sit and picture beautiful images.

With mindful journaling, you’re engaging your imagination but also your creativity. People who have artistic and creative writing talent may find this outlet far more effective than deep breathing or mindfulness meditation.

A couple of mindful journaling and writing exercises to try are:

• Gratitude journals. Gratitude journals help you focus on the positive things in your life, encouraging you to look back at every day to identify and highlight individual events. This practice will help you become more mindful of what you do every day, but also train your brain to actively look for good in even challenging situations.
• Expressive writing prompts. Mindfulness writing prompts can help you to grow more aware of your body, feelings, emotions, and sensations. Simple prompts like “Write everything that you can see or hear” or “Write the details of a single object around you” will give you something to focus on and keep you in the moment as you engage your creative talents.

All writers talk about getting into a “flow state” where you become so focused on what you’re writing that everything around you fades. That’s the goal with these writing practices—and practice will make it much easier to achieve that flow state.

Body Scan and Progressive Relaxation Techniques

When you’re stressed, amped up, or exhausted, your body may send an overload of signals to your brain, which can prove confusing and overwhelming. Aches and pains from athletic activity, injuries, or even simply growing may add to the sensory input.

A couple of excellent mindfulness activities that can help you to be more aware of and comfortable in your own body are:

• Full body awareness. Sit somewhere comfortable and quiet, close your eyes, and catalogue your body parts one by one. Start with your feet, move up your legs, and on to the rest of your body, ending at your head. Identify the sensations in each body part, be they good or bad. Simply becoming more aware of your body can improve proprioception and even improve coordination and balance.
• Progressive muscle relaxation. Take the full body present moment awareness a step farther and help your body to relax. Focus on one muscle or muscle group at a time, and pay attention to sensations that you may experience. Then, mentally will the muscles to relax, the blood to drain, and the muscles to fall asleep. Repeat this until your entire body is relaxed and “sleeping”. It’s a highly effective way to stimulate sleepiness and calm your mind and body when trying to drift off at night.

Taking this type of relaxation breaks throughout the day is a great way to achieve inner peace and reduce symptoms of anxiety in teenagers.

Mindful Movement and Yoga

Mindful movement is another great option for teenagers who have a hard time sitting still, but need to do and move. These movements are intentional and chosen to help you relax, stretch, improve circulation, or simply grow more aware of what your body is capable of.

The more you practice mindful movement, the more comfortable you will grow in your body’s functionality and mobility.

You can try:

• Basic Yoga poses. Simple poses like Downward Dog, the Warrior poses, Tree pose, and Royal Dancer pose encourage you to find the limits of your body while also encouraging greater awareness of your balance and movement. Yoga also encourages you to take slow, controlled breaths both as you move and as you hold the poses. It combines mindful movement and deep breathing techniques for greater awareness and relaxation.
• Stretching with mindfulness. Mindful stretching focuses on how your body feels throughout the stretching process, not the outcome of the stretch. You breathe deep and slowly settle into the stretch, paying attention to any stiffness, pain, or tension in your muscles and joints. It’s amazing for improving your mind-body connection, and daily practice will drastically increase your mobility and flexibility.

For more active teenagers, these two exercises may be the best way to encourage a daily mindfulness practice.

Creative Mindful Activities

Teenagers with artistic talent will find that creative exercise engages their senses and imaginations most effectively.

You can give them an outlet to unleash their creative sides with:

• Artwork. Activities like drawing and journaling the process, mindful coloring, intuitive drawing (letting your hand guide the art), and mindful painting (focusing on the colors and sensations) will be excellent for those with artistic talents.
• Music and movement. This is a bit like dancing, but instead of following a set rhythm or sequence of steps, you allow your body to flow with the music. It involves mindful listening to the music while also following your body’s instincts, letting it do whatever it feels like.

These activities involve more doing, which is great for teenagers with creative minds and active bodies.

Incorporating Mindfulness into Daily Life

You don’t actually have to set aside dedicated time to practice mindfulness—you can incorporate mindfulness into everything you do!

Here are some simple exercises to help you explore mindfulness in your daily life:

• Mindful eating. Choose one meal every day to be more mindful of. Pay attention to the flavors, sensations, textures, even the way the food affects your body. Be mindful of how your body goes through the motions of chewing and swallowing, or the interplay of muscles required to feed yourself.
• Mindful walking. Pick a park or forest path to walk around and really pay attention to your surroundings. Identify the sounds of birds, the plants and trees you encounter, and the smells that drift across your path. Focus on the temperature, the sensation of sunlight, the feeling of rainfall, and the solid earth beneath your feet. A mindful walk pairs excellently with mindful photography.
• Mindful hobbies. Whether you play an instrument, garden, cook, sew, or build LEGO sets, you can use the hobby as a mindfulness practice. Pay attention to the sensations and feelings you experience as you practice your hobby, be they good or bad. Change the way you view the hobby: not as something to accomplish or master, but a mindfulness activity that brings you joy in that moment and satisfies some creative or intellectual desire.

Just being more mindful in anything you do every day will help you to become more aware of yourself, your thoughts and feelings, and the world around you. Best of all, it will combat stress and reduce anxiety while also improving mental clarity.

Resources and Tools for Mindfulness Practice

Here are some great resources and tools you can use for your daily mindfulness practice:

• The Mindfulness + Meditation Resources from Stanford University features a wealth of audio meditations and guided mindfulness practices.
• The Free Resources page of the Free Mindfulness Projectprovides downloadable meditations, guided imagery, and animated video and audio files for mindfulness practice.
• Mindful Teachers has a list of Resources for Practicing and Teaching Mindfulness filled with valuable tools to help you in your daily meditations and mindfulness.
• The Zonia platform also contains a wide range of resources in the form of meditations, audios, and breathing exercises to try out.

Whether you’re new to mindfulness training or you’ve had years of practice, these resources will prove highly useful!

Wrapping Up

Teaching mindfulness can be an absolute game-changer for your mental, emotional, and physical health.

As you saw above, the list of benefits for teens and adolescents is impressively long—from reduced stress to improved mood, lower depression risk to greater concentration and focus. It’s absolutely worth putting them into practice in your daily life.

Don’t worry if you’ve never tried it before. There are so many ways you can practice based on what works best for your mind and body. Whether you try meditating in bed, practicing mindfulness while walking, or engaging in some mindful cooking or creative writing activity, there’s a solution that will help improve your life!

We hope these tips will help you get a deep relaxing sleep. However, if you need further help, you should try magnesium supplementation. Restore Sleep magnesium formula contains the 7 most powerful forms of magnesium that support optimal brain function, help achieve deep restorative sleep and promote total body relaxation. 

Click here to learn more about Restore Sleep and how it can change your life for the better through providing your body with the best magnesium complex to improve your brain function, sleep quality and relaxation response. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What are two simple ways you can practice mindfulness in your everyday life?

Next time you sit down at a meal, practice mindful eating by paying attention to the flavors, textures, and sensations of your food, and the way your body goes through the motions of chewing and swallowing. At night, when you’re relaxing and trying to fall asleep, focus on slowing your breathing and taking long, slow inhales and exhales. Two simple activities, but they can help you become a lot more mindful!

What is the 5 4 3 2 1 mindfulness exercise?

The 5 4 3 2 1 mindfulness exercise encourages you to find:

• 5 things you can see
• 4 things you can touch
• 3 things you can hear
• 2 things you can smell
• 1 thing you can taste

It’s an excellent exercise for combatting anxiety or preventing panic attacks.

What is the 3 3 3 mindfulness exercise?

The 3 3 3 mindfulness exercise is a grounding technique utilized to enhance focus on specific details in your surroundings, excellent for if you feel overwhelmed or sensory overloaded.

With this exercise, you find:

• 3 objects in your environment. Notice their texture, shape, color, and any other detail you can focus on.
• 3 sounds you can hear. Identify them and focus on them.
• 3 parts of your body you can move. The simple act of moving these body parts—fingers, toes, arms, neck, etc.—will help to “ground” you.

Resources

Mindfulness activities for teens and students

Mindfulness Exercises

25 Fun Mindfulness Activities for Kids & Teens

Five Mindfulness Activities for Each of the Five Senses