The Mindful Teen: Powerful Skills to Help You Handle Stress One Moment at a Time

by Dzung X. Vo MD FAAP

In this powerful book, a pediatrician specializing in teen and adolescent medicine offers a breakthrough mindfulness program to help you deal with stress in healthy ways, improve communication, and reduce conflicts with family and friends.
 Being a teen is stressful! Whether it’s school, friends, or dating, the teen years are full of difficult changes―both mentally and physically. If you're like many teens, you may have difficulty dealing with stress in effective ways. You aren’t alone, and there are things you can do to stay calm, no matter how stressful life becomes. All you need to do is stop, breathe, and be mindful and aware in the present moment.
  The Mindful Teen offers a unique program based in mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) to help you deal with stress. The simple, practical, and easy-to-remember tips in this book can be used every day to help you handle any difficult situation more effectively―whether it’s taking a test at school, having a disagreement with your parents, or a problem you are having with friends.
 If you’re ready to uncover your own inner strength and resilience through mindful awareness and take charge of your life, this book will show you how.

Genres: Self Help, Nonfiction, Parenting, Psychology

248 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2015

Reviews

[Eve Costarelli]

Book Review: The Mindful Teen by Dzung X. Vo, MD, FAAP

I was so excited to receive my copy of The Mindful Teen by Dzung X. Vo MD, FAAP. I am currently creating and implementing a yoga and mindfulness program through Open Spirit Center's Nourishing Teachers, Strengthening Classrooms project into the Framingham, MA public school system and this books title grabbed me and I knew it would become an invaluable resource.

The chapters are clearly thought through and touch on everything from every day stressors to in-school stressors to home stressors and the exercises offered help you to flex your mindfulness muscles with techniques to awaken the wisdom inside you and like all exercise, lead you to a sense of well-being, inner calmness, increased kindness to yourself and to others and increased resilience to stress.

The questions posed in the book are there to aid you in identifying your own experiences and to help guide you to deeper self-reflection. I love the Teen Voices boxes as they offer personal stories in a teen voice that express strong testaments to other teens. This book does not lecture but rather offers simple strategies to access mindfulness in daily life. This book gives teens the means to embrace the now engaging them to look for the wisdom and strength they possess to heal themselves from all that life throws at them.

I highly recommend this book to teens and adults alike. It is so accessible an user friendly and just full of insight and meaningful and practical ways to make the mindfulness connection. There are many great ideas that I have already stared using in my own teen and education based mindfulness program. I see this book as a necessary addition to libraries, to schools, to yoga teachers, to parents and to anyone who is or who works with teenagers.

Full Disclosure: The authors provided me with a copy of The Mindful Teen to review. All opinions expressed are my own.

[Nadine]

Superb! Although aimed at teens, any age can learn mindfulness or meditation from this easy to read book. It's very accessible to readers with use of various fonts to key into ideas and sections of TRY THIS, TEEN VOICES, and the stories of actual teens. I recommend you print out the worksheets and download the audio guided meditations before reading so their use is ready to go (found in Resources pages 224-225). I received a copy for review from Goodreads First Reads.

[Roger]

Excellent resource for teenagers. As a counselor/therapist I highly recommend it to teens. This would be a good resource to anyone looking for ways to manage stress.

[Poonam Dubal]

I was highly skeptical of "yet another mindfulness book." BUT I was really impressed with this book. Written by a doctor who works a lot with adolescents, Vo speaks directly to the teen brain with simple, yet incisive writing. He includes well-written mindfulness practices, great nuggets of wisdom, and has an accompanying website with audio versions of mindfulness practices to help teens. A great gift to the teen/adolescent in your life, but also good for adults!

[Micha O'Connor]

Let’s face it- being a teenager is difficult! Between school and homework, afterschool activities, family, and college preparation, life is stressful. Teens can definitely benefit from the practice of mindfulness. The book is divided in to 3 parts: Core Mindfulness Skills, Handling Stressful Situations, and Your Life Journey. Dr. Vo offers tips throughout for finding mindful moment in a day, as well as success stories from some of his patients. I highly recommend this book to the stressed-out teen in your life.

[Susan Bridges]

This book puts a lot of emphasis on friendships, best friends, and even boyfriend/girlfriend relationships, all of which are used as examples throughout the book - and are points of stress to many teens (do I have enough friends? Is this person really my best friend?) I think this does a disservice to teens who don’t have a lot of friends.

There is nothing wrong with not having lots of friends. But the constant examples could really affect a teen who struggles with friendships. For that reason I can’t recommend this book.

[Notty_AG]

A good book about teens. I really enjoyed it
The perfect book for a perfect stress free life. I like how Vo wrote
This book as if he knew each on of us😊......but what do you expect he does specialise in this kind of teen things. I would recommend this book to anyone even an adult it a must read book this one. I'm a whole new person now. And I like how Vo says this book is not for teen BT rather future alduts.
I was not aware that I am living a life of stress till I started reading this book and yess why a great book I read. I hope I will practice mindfulness forever I guess weather the formal or the informal one

[Linda]

My teen daughter who suffers from depression and anxiety found some very powerful tools in this book. She is better able to bounce back or hold through difficult episodes by practicing the exercises within. The tools are accompanied by testimonials from real teens about how they used them in a specific stressful situation. These aren't polished, and seem genuine.

She asked me to read it. I already practice mindfulness. I found it a bit simplistic and repetitive, but it wasn't written for me. I can't argue with results.

For non-audio readers, there are links to audio guided mindfulness exercises.

[Deajha]

I'm actually very surprised at how much I end up thinking this book was actually OK. I did like it in fact.I normally don't read non-fiction/ self help material a lot so I'm glad this was one of the first books I was exposed to because it showed me that they all can actually be understood. I actually want to implement some of the ideas in this book in my own life.

[Michelle]

This is a really excellent guide with a very down to earth presentation. There is a wide variety of practices as well as the exhortation and guidance to develop your own plan to manage your own stress. Well cited with a good bibliography and additional resources. The ebook version has links to recordings of guided practices for each chapter as well as written guidance. I’d recommend it highly!

[Maddy]

It was an easy read, and it has a ton of useful tips and great quotes :) I wish I read it sooner when I was struggling more, but better late than never! This book has inspired me to take better care of myself so I can live a full, happy life. Definitely would recommend!!

[Christian Wissa]

This book is very informative and helps me deal with stress and emotions. This book gives specific tips on how to deal with your emotions and stress. This book was very good and I highly recommend it.

[Emily]

Did not enjoy the activities.

[Constance]

I enjoy reading this book and there's a lot I learned from it.

[Tom]

It was very good book to read about how you deal when you get mad or annoyed.

[Lành]

Notice and observe the breath, mind and heart whenever I feel stressful. A little but great book on mindfulness and happiness for myself.
Thank you Dr Dzung for the sharings!
Thanks chi Tram for the book!

[Lucy Gould]

Got some great skills for managing stress.

[Lucia]

Looking for the power to overcome and beat up stress, this is the book that is going to provide you with skills, habits, and amazing activities for your growth. MINDFULNESS THE POWER OF ALL.

[Serity]

Really helpful ways of talking about these concepts! I bought the book to use with my kids.

[K Hue]

one of the more readable books on mindfulness for teens...

[Susan]

Good book that provides the background for mindfulness practice as well as some very useful activities for all ages, especially youth.

[Isabel Schwartz]

I loved this book because I felt very educated along the process. I think it’s important to be aware of the ideas that were presented because I feel that a lot of teens struggle with stress and it’s essential for our mental health to learn how to deal with or prevent it.

[Nannette McNamara]

Skimmed mostly but I'm going to buy this book for work.

[Alaa Jerbi]

A Cool book with a lot of helpful techniques that deal with stress! I recommend it!

[Rayne McGlamery-Nygren]

Very helpful resource geared towards teens. Contextualizes mindfulness within school day, extracurriculars, and other common adolescent experiences.

[Rebecca]

Easy to read, relatable. Positive and easy interventions to help teens, and adults be more mindful, aware and present.

[Anele]

This book is a good life guide not only for children but even older people because we all experience stress in some points in our lives and we also at some point have to make good decisions. This book so far has taught me how to do mindful meditation. Well it doesn't only include one type of meditating but I surprised to read that there many ways of doing mindful meditation. There are two types of meditating including formal and informal meditation. Well I have just discovered that mostly I do the practice of informal meditation without even noticing. I was surprised when I read that dish washing is also part of informal meditation. Washing the dishes is not fun but guess what, we can make it fun by just being of the present moment, the smell around you, how the water feels like, and also how soft is the detergent in your hands. So this book is 100% recommendable to other people either old or young. At first we may question reading it but not the results of it.

[Thandeka Masango]

It was a great book which teaches about how to handle stress in a mindful way. I got inspired into doing the meditations if I have any stress.