Positive Psychology Techniques to Boost Teen Mental Health: Simple Strategies for Parents

Sep 24, 2024

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Dr. Cam Caswell is joined by Mark Fussell to explore powerful strategies for supporting teens' mental health. Mark shares insights from his platform, Take Two Minutes, which focuses on boosting mental wellness through positive psychology. They discuss practical tools like gratitude journaling, grounding exercises, and breathing techniques to help teens manage emotions and anxiety. The episode emphasizes the importance of patience, kindness, and love in fostering a supportive environment for teens' mental health.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE

How to support teens' mental health using positive psychology and proven techniques
Effective strategies for managing anxiety, including gratitude journaling and grounding exercises
The impact of gratitude on rewiring the brain for better emotional wellness
Why patience, kindness, and love are essential when supporting teens' mental health
Tips for fostering emotional resilience and helping teens bounce back from negativity

5 KEY TAKEAWAYS FOR PARENTS OF TEENS

Mental health is crucial for teens, and there are many ways parents can support their well-being.
Take Two Minutes platform offers accessible tools for enhancing mental wellness through positive psychology.
Gratitude journaling, grounding exercises, and breathing techniques are effective for reducing anxiety and improving emotional health.
Support requires patience and the willingness to try different strategies that resonate with your teen.
Positive reinforcement and kindness can help teens overcome emotional hurdles and thrive.

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RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

Take Two Minutes platform - Website
Use coupon code "DRCAM" for 20% off Take Two Minutes platform.

EPISODE CHAPTERS

00:00 Introduction to Supporting Teens' Mental Health
04:02 Tools for Managing Emotions and Anxiety
08:58 The Power of Gratitude in Rewiring the Brain
10:57 The Importance of Patience and Trying Different Strategies
12:32 Grounding Exercises for Calming Anxiety
18:31 Recognizing Positivity and Rebounding from Negative Experiences

CONNECT WITH OUR GUEST: Mark Fussell

Website: take2minutes.org
Instagram: @take2min
Facebook: @take2min
YouTube: @take2min

CONNECT WITH YOUR HOST: Dr. Cam Caswell

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Cam (00:02.636)

Today we're diving into a topic that couldn't be more crucial, your teens' mental health. As parents, we all want our kids to thrive emotionally, but knowing how to support them can sometimes feel overwhelming. So we've got some game -changing proven strategies that we're gonna give to you so they're right at your fingertips during the tough times. That's why I'm thrilled to have Mark Fussell with us today. Mark is the founder of Take Two Minutes, a platform that's all about boosting mental wellness through the science of positive psychology. Mark is here to share actionable techniques that you can start using right away. Welcome, Mark.

Marc S Fussell (00:40.344)

Thank you, Dr. Kam. I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Cam (00:43.248)

Yeah, this is a very important topic and I know I talk to a lot of parents that just want tools or like just tell us what we can do. So before we even get going, I would love to hear what sparked the idea of the Take Two Minutes.

Marc S Fussell (00:57.229)

It's interesting. It's actually my who now is my older son, but at the time he was much younger in 2015, my older son was in high school and he was struggling with what I call typical high school problems. And I say what I call because every everyone deals with things very differently. So when I heard of what was happening or what he was sad, depressed about in my mind, I was like, this is high school difficulties. And I decided to try to address it by something simple, which was sending him a message every day around noon. So in middle of his school day, letting him know he's loved, letting me know those people who care about him, just trying to lift his spirits. And that grew into me having a database of these positive messages. I'm a developer by heart. guess, you know, going back to my, my younger years, I was always a developer. So even when I was sending these messages to him, I was still in technology. And what I realized was every day when I wanted to send him a message, quite often I was in a meeting. I was doing something that was preoccupying my time. Further, most of my positivity was happening in the morning when I was either exercising or doing yoga or meditating. And around noon, as you may know, we have more stressful lives. And so I put together a little system that allowed me to write positive messages in the morning, put it into a document and the system would just take one out of the documents and send it to him every day. So yeah, they were still my messages. They were just being more automated sending to him. Well, that kind of snowballed into more people wanting to receive the messages. And I think at some point in time, I had 10, 15 people getting the messages and I didn't think anything else of it. thought this is kind of cool. People are reading my positive messages. So it's great. Well, one day I was in a coffee shop and someone behind me overheard me talking about it to the person who I knew is at the coffee shop. And they said, I get your messages too. And I had no idea that anyone else was getting them. And so I went and looked and there was about 300 people in the database who were receiving the messages. Yeah. So I was a little bit taken back and realized, I should probably do more with this because right now they're just my positive messages I've kind of made up. And not that I'm an expert, but I think they were good messages. So ultimately I reached out to my network of connections and learned that I had a connection with a doctor of psychology at Duke University. He was able to spend a lot of time on the phone with me, teaching me all about positive psychology, teaching me all about his studies. He had seven or eight years worth of studies he had done at that point around positive psychology and things that help people and really black and white data about how they help people. And so I started building out what's now Take Two Minutes. And that was probably in 2017, 2018, I started building Take Two Minutes.

Dr. Cam (03:33.034)

That is amazing and it's so great to have used technology for good. There's a lot of things we can do with good. So I love this and having those positive messages. We know the impact when you get them on a regular basis can rewire the brain. So you're helping your teenager rewire their brain to be more positive, which is phenomenal. And now we are talking about tools that parents can have. And this that itself is a great one.

right, just sending those messages. But I have a lot of kids, especially once school starts, that really struggle to manage their emotions, that get very anxious about things, and parents want to help them and they don't know how. And so I'd love to provide some tools for them on what can they do when they see that their teen is struggling, what can they help them with.

Marc S Fussell (04:28.458)

Right. So I think there's a lot of answers to that question. And I'm going to start with, there is no one solution for everybody, right? And let's just start there. And I think that's an obvious statement, but not everyone recognizes that. The goal is to keep trying until you find something that works for the individual. Take two minutes is one of the many things you can try. Obviously, I'm gonna talk about take two minutes because it's my, as you said, my passion, what I know a lot about, but ultimately I know about positive psychology and there are a lot of tools out there and you have to find the one that works the best for your children. So what take two minutes can offer is a few things. We have a few different activities I'm gonna talk about that could help children.

Also, you mentioned the positive messages. We still have positive messages. They have grown. So we actually have an entire subset of positive messages now that are meant for middle school and high school kids. were created, the little subset, when I say little, it's 400 messages. They were created by teachers, school counselors, and also regular counselors and therapists that are really more targeted at that younger age. They're shorter messages. They're not quite as in depth with some of the messages. And they were written by people who work with kids to help kids. So there's a whole subset of positive messages just for younger audience, we'll say. On and above that, within Take Two Minutes, a parent can sign up for Take Two Minutes and buy a license for their child or children or entire family.

And a neat feature we have is the ability for the parent to see what activities the children are doing. So can actually get a report showing if they have one or more than one kid, each child and what things they're doing. And they can look at the report on a day basis or a week basis or whatever. many of the activities we have allows the recipient to check in, like how are you feeling right now? And so as if a child does check in their mood,

A parent can see their mood even different times throughout the day, how they're feeling if they have checked in multiple times. That's something that's really good. And from advice and input from therapists and counselors, the parents cannot read the child's personal data. So if the child is making journal entries, which is good, the parents don't have access to read those. The parents can go to the child and go, I'm seeing you're using these tools. I'm really happy. Anything you want to talk about, any of your entries you want to talk about, they can try to have that conversation but they don't have direct access to see the entries. It is still a private entry for the child. So going back to things that help, you mentioned rewiring the brain. think on and above just receiving positive messages, biggest, one of the largest things anyone can do to help rewire their brain is recognizing gratitude. It's really difficult to be in a negative spot and recognize gratitude at the same time. I don't know if it's even possible, honestly. So the recognition of gratitude or what is commonly called a gratitude journal is something that really anyone who's struggling should get in the habit of trying to do. Now within take two minutes, I'm going to ask, let you ask questions. But one more thing I want to add here with regards to gratitude journaling. I learned over the years that a lot of people struggle with gratitude journaling. If you're in a bad place, if you're depressed, if you're a child who's dealing with problems,

And a parent or anyone says, Hey, I want you to start gratitude journaling. Even if you want to, even if you sit down and try, you may sit there and think, I have nothing to be grateful for. You move on. And so what I have developed also, in addition to a gratitude journal is what I call the gratitude challenge. The gratitude challenge came from all this learning I've done about people who struggle with thinking of things they're grateful for. The gratitude challenge every day will send you a prompt of something for which you should be grateful. And it will ask you to write a statement on why you are grateful for that. What this does talking about rewiring the brain is it starts allowing someone to recognize things in their daily life for which they should be grateful. As they start recognizing those things, they will actually recognize more gratitude. After a short amount of time, I found in my studies, someone only needs about 10 to 14 days of gratitude challenges until they start just recognizing gratitude around them automatically.

So the gratitude challenge is a fun exercise that I encourage people who are struggling to take a chance with. And ideally, after a 14, 20 day gratitude challenge, you can then just smoothly transition into a gratitude journaling exercise.

Dr. Cam (08:58.422)

That's fantastic. are some of the things on there that just give us some examples of the things that you say we should be grateful for that kind of prompts the kids?

Marc S Fussell (09:09.193)

Right. So the one I use the same example quite often, and it is the sun provides heat and light to our planet. Think of a reason why you like the sun. And so it, it, that's, it's just a very simple topic. gives them one thing to think about and one thing to write a gratitude statement on. There's about 180 different prompts right now. And the goal of all those prompts is ideally not to trigger anyone, not to, try to touch on a topic that someone can't relate to, so they try to be all topics everybody can relate to. And of course, that's a tough thing to do. But yeah, right. But we've done our best to make sure that they all fit in that range. And so there's 180 of them. And ideally, if you do a gratitude challenge, system lets you, by default, it'll do seven days. But you can say, want to do a 20 day, a 15 day, whatever you want to do. And it'll continue it for that amount of time.

Dr. Cam (10:03.012)

I love that and I think when you've got something, an outside source that kind of plays into their technology, they might be more open to do it or you can do it as a family and just say, hey, let's figure out and if we all can come up with stuff, which is a great way to connect too. So we've got the gratitude, which yes, gratitude is a phenomenal way to rewire the brain. I always encourage parents to do this about their teens is find a daily, at least three things they're grateful for about their teen, which can start very difficult, but it changes that dynamic too. So I love the gratitude. What about when our teen is in a moment and they're stressing out and anxious and they want help, but they're also resistant to help. What are some very powerful tools that we can help our teens use in order to be able to get them through that?

Marc S Fussell (10:57.363)

Thankfully, because of a couple of larger companies, meditation is becoming a little more popular in today's age, or at least more people are aware of the idea of meditation. Take Two Minutes has hundreds and hundreds of meditations built into it, but specifically, I have a small library of meditations that are really focused on calming someone down from anxiety. And so, we haven't touched on this yet. Take Two Minutes is largely a text -based app. And so, it's an app. It has a website. The website this was called a mobile first design. So it's really designed for the mobile phone. You can do everything from the website. However, you can also do everything via just texting. a lot of, especially a lot of people love that because the fact that you always have your phone in your hand, you respond to text messages. And so you can, if you have a moment of anxiety, instead of trying to go to the website or find the app on your phone, just go to your text messages and text a message back to the service saying, I have anxiety it's gonna immediately send you back two exercises. It's immediately send you back a grounding exercise and a meditation that's focused on anxiety. You can use either of them, but it sends that back within seconds usually. And you can hit the meditation, sit down and follow along and ideally calm yourself down from that moment. The meditations that are in the anxiety focused meditations, again, there's about 20 and the whole purpose of those is to calm you down. And some of them are some breathing exercises. Some are just visualizations you follow along, but they really ideally help someone calm down from that panic attack or stressful moment.

Dr. Cam (12:32.416)

Yeah, and I think when you've got that presented to you, because a lot of times when parents present it, it just adds to the anxiety because kids feel a little pressured going, okay, mom's telling me that I need to breathe and I'm not feeling like breathing and now I feel pressured to breathe because mom wants me to and it's like, it kind of builds it up. So having something that generates it for you through their type of communication is really nice and having that. we've got gratitude. We do, we've got the grounding exercise, right? And is that the five, four, three, two.

Marc S Fussell (13:00.891)

Yes, yes. It is, it's the one, five things you see around you, four things you, I think here, three things you smell, yeah. I think it's a great exercise. And I'm sure you know this, you've probably talked about it, it brings someone into the present, it brings someone into their surroundings and makes you focus on things around you. And again, Dr. Cam, I'm sure you know this, but anxiety is worrying about the future. So if you're worried about something upcoming or possibilities of something, if you can bring yourself into your surroundings and where you're at right now, that helps alleviate that anxiety.

Dr. Cam (13:37.312)

It really does and it gets you out of the head, out of your head. always liken it to, you you're riding your bike and a twig gets in there and you just go, boom, it just stops the wheels, right? It's kind of like that where it just stops that hamster wheel in your brain. The grounding exercise I use with my own daughter quite a lot to the point now where she just looks at me and she goes, okay, mom, let's start, you know, when she's starting to feel, because by the time you're done with it, you have stopped it enough to be able to regain even if you're still stressed out, you at least aren't stuck in that like hyperventilation, Like freaking out thing. So doing that, a lot of kids resist breathing. How do we get our kids on board? Because breathing is probably the number one best way to calm ourselves down. But it gets a lot of eye rolls. People are like, my God, breathing.

So how do we talk about breathing to our teens in a way that doesn't sound all woo woo and they can buy into it?

Marc S Fussell (14:42.724)

So before we get to breathing back to the grounding exercise, I want to add that a lot of people to it, to make this exercise more impactful for anybody. have to. So what I found is a few of the numbers, especially when you start talking about things you smell and things you hear, you have to really focus on those. And those are the key ones, right? It's really easy. It's easy to look around and go, I see a clock, I see a speaker, I see a picture, I see, and that's almost topical, right? It's so easy to see things quickly.

I ideally am for most people at least. hearing, hearing is one of those things where depending on where you're at, you may have to focus more, which is good. The point of that exercise is to focus a little bit because that is what's going to bring yourself into the present moment. So hearing or listening, you may have to start really trying to hone in on what you hear. And maybe it's a car out in the distance or a train or wrestling of Lee's, that

Focus is what helps that exercise be impactful. If you make it very topical and just make it very, hear this, I hear that. Well then move on to smell because smells even more difficult quite often, right?

Dr. Cam (15:44.35)

can ever get smell. It's two things you smell. Let's go, it's five things you see, four things you can feel like against your body, not emotions. Three things you hear, two things you can smell and one thing you taste. So you're going through all the different senses. And when we get to smell, I struggle to smell more than one thing. Like that's a tough thing for us to do, I think.

Marc S Fussell (15:51.685)

But the beauty of that is if you do try hard, that is what's helping that exercise work for you. Because if you just pass it up, that's not going to be as impactful as really trying. And the feel one is one I like because you got to really start thinking about sitting in a seat. I feel my sit bone against the seat. I feel the arm against my elbow over here. Right. So you got to kind of focus on those things. And that focus is what makes that really, really impactful. So I wanted to touch on that real quickly before we got to breathing. But for breathing, there's a couple of things on breathing also.

In addition to the meditations that are focused on helping with anxiety, we have another library of breathing exercises. So there are many breathing techniques, as you are probably aware. There's not just a breathing technique. So a couple of things on breathing is I recommend people to try, you know, quite a few of them out of the library. think my breathing exercise library has 18 different breathing exercises. So keep trying different ones until you find one you like. Once you find one you like, you can add it to your library so you can get back to it quickly so you can reuse it. However, with breathing, the goal is to recognize your breath. If you calm down from it, if you're calming down from anxiety, it's not so much just your awareness, yeah, I'm breathing. It's deep, purposeful breaths and purposeful exhales. I find for me, what works the best is inhaling through the nose, exhaling through the mouth. Everyone's a little bit different. Every breathe exercise is a little bit different, but you make very purposeful inhales that are really deep and even audible if need be. then you can make, you know, let out a big as you're exhaling and repeat that. Then focus on feeling again feet. We're talking about feels, right? So feeling the air go into your nostrils, feeling the air go down, feeling your stomach expand on the breath. So feeling those things that again brings you back into the present moment because you're really focusing on something that's happening right now and around you.

Dr. Cam (18:01.544)

Yeah, I think the key with this and across all of these is finding that technique that gets you out of your head and into just the tangibles and the truth, right? Because a lot of where anxiety comes from, it's like the story we're building and building and building, and there's rarely any truth to it. You know, it's kind of this buildup thing. And so now we're getting to something really true and real and here, which all of those things kind of ground us.

I like that with an app you can just get it, right? So you don't have to remember it. Because I think that's one of the challenges too. And if you don't have the app, one of the things to remember is these are things you have to practice when you're calm because your brain is not going to remember what to do when you're in fight or flight. It's already gone, right? So this is about finding that exercise and having it become automated beforehand. And even if you have the app, having that turning to the app has to be automated because you're not going to think of that either, right? Do you find that as a challenge or what are your recommendations for that?

Marc S Fussell (19:09.4)

I think what you said is spot on because you do want to get accustomed to some of those exercises and not just try them when you're in that fight or flight or really panic mode. Cause it's not going to be as obvious to you at that point. So you have to almost play with the app some first. So you're familiar with how to get to things. And again, I've tried to make it really, really easy. You you mentioned the word app since it is a mobile designed website or it's called a progressive web app. You can put a link right on your note desktop or home screen of your phone. It's really easy to do. You can put a link right there so you can get to it almost immediately. also, again, as I mentioned, we've made it where it's text friendly also, so you can text messages to it get responses. So the goal is to make it as easily accessible as possible. But with that said, some practice ahead of time or playing ahead of time so you become familiar with it and are aware it's there as a tool for you helps you when you do need it.

Dr. Cam (20:01.844)

Yeah, and I think, and I'm thinking in my head too, because a lot of times the kids that I talk to when they're going through anxiety don't actually have access to their phone because the phone has been removed from them because, and that's some of the reason why they are experiencing anxiety is because the phone has been taken and that's kind of their lifeline. So I think it's really important that if you are removing the phone to consider that, that that might be a lifeline. So you need to first decide what that is. And if you are, to have some of these other tools in place and taught and prepared and ready for them if they need to figure it out and access themselves, correct?

Marc S Fussell (20:39.895)

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's an interesting, almost like rabbit hole we could talk about. I don't want to talk about it too much, but you know, removing the phone, I get why it's done. don't want, we, in our minds, especially older generations look at the devices as a crutch, right? We didn't have them when we were kids, why they needed it. But these days they're kind of like just a part of life. So removing them, even though it may seem obvious to us that we, cause we didn't need them as a kid a lot of children rely upon those things. That is, like you said, their lifeline. It's almost like their security blanket sometimes. It's just what they're accustomed to having. so monitoring what they're doing on them is definitely important, right? You don't want them doing anything bad or anything they shouldn't be doing. And I'm not going to tell anyone, don't remove their children's phones. Obviously it's your child, do what you want to do. But I think that definitely can add some anxiety because in their minds, it's something they're just accustomed to having quite often.

Dr. Cam (21:33.548)

Yeah. And I think that it is, it's a decision that if that is what you're going to do, that's fine and that's your decision, but making sure that you're replacing that with something else because we tend to just take it and not replace it with anything. And so that leaves your child just struggling, right? Rather than saying, okay, I know this is a security blanket and what do you use it for? Let's find something else. That's why too, we want to make sure we've got a lot of these tools and we've been walking through. And you said at the beginning, and I want to reiterate this, this is about finding what works for your team. So you may go through a lot of different things and your team is just going to be like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. That is fine. Keep finding. Don't give up or something. Right? So we've got, and you're right, breathing, there's a ton of different things.

I like the grounding exercise just because it feels more like a game a little bit than Zen meditations, gratitude. What are we missing?

Marc S Fussell (22:39.156)

Again, just when you say gratitude, don't forget the gratitude challenge. That's huge. Now earlier, though, you mentioned you touched on with your child. Sometimes you think of three, three things, three good things you liked. So the three good things exercise is an actual exercise in positive psychology that is huge. And some people don't fully understand how it's supposed to work. So I'm to touch on that real quickly. Gratitude journaling. Most of the time, I mean, the time what I've heard time and time again is best in the early day hours. So sometime in the morning, wake up, try to write a gratitude statement, write two if you can. That is different from three good things. Three good things ideally is an exercise that is supposed to be done in the evening, so prior to bed. And you're supposed to reflect on the day and think of three good things that happened that day to you. The purpose of this is it puts your mind into a positive state prior to going to bed many people, even children, us, so many people have stressful days, right? And at the end of the day, sometimes you're exhausted. Maybe it was a bad day. Maybe you had problems. and so you're going to bed quite often, maybe in a negative mood, even though you don't recognize this negative mood, doing three good things in the evening makes you reflect on the day and makes you think about good things that happen. And sometimes it's a struggle. Some days you're like, I can't think of anything, but it's little things, right?

someone held the door for you. That was very nice of them. Someone said, thank you. didn't know where you talk to. Think of little things. It doesn't have to be a monumental change, but three good things. Go to sleep. Your subconscious then works on that positivity. And this is what's creating new routes in your head, neural pathways for positivity. You wake up with a little bit more positivity. The studies have shown, and there's been a lot of studies on three good things, that if you do that for just

15 days only 15 days It will have a lasting effect on your mental well -being for four months meaning that those 15 days of Thinking of three good things that happened to you prior to going to bed Because of again your subconscious and how it uses that information you will have More positivity in your life for the next up to the next four months

Dr. Cam (24:57.824)

This is such an amazing thing to do as a family again, right? If you're to that point, even around dinner table, it's like, are three things that were great today? Share them with us. Because when we, the other thing is when we either write them down or vocalize it, it's much more prominent than if we just think it, right? So putting that out there makes it a lot more powerful. And I also want to highlight what you said too, that we often think it has to be this big major thing, right?

And it can be the smallest thing. One of the things I do with teens is I say, just look around the room and pick one thing, just any random thing there, and tell me what are you grateful for about that? Just that, that one thing. So it can be so completely simple. The whole point is it's making your brain think of the positive and not stuck in that negative. Why, and I know positive psychology gets into this a lot, why are we kind of geared towards going to the negative. Why is that so easy to do and the positive we have to be so intentional about?

Marc S Fussell (26:03.605)

There's a lot of discussion around that. And I think it falls back to in our, you know, centuries and centuries ago, we had to be aware of the negatives because there could be a bear after us or a saber tooth tiger. had to be aware of our surroundings because we needed to protect ourselves. We primarily live in a day and age now where generally we're pretty protected. You know, you're in a house, you have a lot of securities, but that You know, it goes, it's very similar to the reason why we are all predisposition to really want sugar, want salt and what fat, right? It's things to keep our survival going. and that negativity is things to keep our survival going. However, everything plays on that, you know, news plays on that negativity to, to incite you, to get you to watch more news or be concerned. Social media is really bad about trying to show you the negatives to get you engaged with the conversation. I think, at one point in time, I read a whole article about Facebook. use their algorithms, took anything negative and put it up top to hopefully engage people to try to respond more. then you're just being negativities being dumped on you and you're playing up on that. And it makes you more negative. Barbara Fredrickson said the negativity screams at us, whereas the positivity only whispers. And I think I probably didn't get that quote exactly right. But the premise is accurate that you have to look for the positivity sometimes. But what happens is, and you talked about changing again, your brains pathways, it's really it's called priming. So once you get accustomed to recognizing positive things, recognizing gratitude, once you start doing it, once you get in the habit of doing it, your brain will just automatically start doing it more and more. And the beauty of it is, and I tell people this all the time, we're not looking for fake positivity, we're not looking for fake happiness, we're not trying to say, you're always happy. The goal is that life's going to have ebbs and flows. Once you have a good amount of gratitude and you recognize gratitude around you and you're recognizing positivity through positive psychology. When bad things happen, you're able to rebound more quickly because bad things are still going to happen. You're going to have problems in life. You're going to have unfortunate deaths. You're going to have grievance. You're going to have problems in life all the time. The idea behind positive psychology, the idea behind recognizing positivity is being able to rebound from those things often or more quickly. So I know myself, I have Yeah, as we all do, I don't want this isn't a, you feel sorry for marketing, but I have a lot going on, right? I'm a CIO. I take care of, take two minutes. have kids. have, you know, helping people and every day there are challenges and there are times where there's grievances. I can usually, since I've been practicing positive psychology for years now, I can recognize when I'm in a bad state, I can recognize when I'm in a negative state, right? And when I recognize that because I'm able to recognize it doesn't mean I'm able to instantly fix it. can't just flip a switch and go, I'm happy again. But because I recognize it, I do a better job, I believe, of not reflecting that negativity on other people. I do a better job of trying to maybe avoid people who I care about just so I don't be more negative around them until I'm able to get over it. And I can use things I know to get myself into a better positive state in a shorter amount of time. you know, everyone's going be different with what that timeframe is. If it's a death in the family, it might take you weeks to get over and that's okay. Nothing's wrong with that. But the goal of a positive psychology is you do recognize it and you're able to dig yourself out of the hole.

Dr. Cam (29:25.44)

I’m glad you brought that up because I think there is this false assumption or belief about positive psychology that it's just everything's shiny and pretty and I'm going to just ignore reality. But what I see a lot and again, I see this with my teens a lot is that we create a reality that's far more negative and they have these they go to the end create stories that are super, super negative and see that as the reality.

And so I'll make them do like, okay, come up with a opposing story that is so beyond crazy positive. That's just as true. That feels really weird to you and uncomfortable, but it is just as true as this really, really negative one. Let's get somewhere in the middle so that we're, because how our brain thinks is how we interact with the world. So we can create really negative interactions and the same person can experience the exact same thing and not have the negative impact. So I think it's really important that this is, and like you said, and I just want to expand on that because I think that is a very big misconception people have. I also want to share that yesterday was the exact day that I had where I had to tell my daughter, she came down and I said, I'm not in a good mood today, just to let you know.

Marc S Fussell (30:40.542)

it is.

Dr. Cam (30:50.964)

And she sends me a text later and she goes, mom, have to tell you this, but I didn't want to tell you in the morning because she told me you were in a bad mood. But I was just like, I'm just going let you know now. I'm not in a good place. I'm trying. I'm going to get out of it. But right now I'm just not there. And it helped because now we weren't triggering one another.

Marc S Fussell (31:11.325)

Right. Yeah. And that's what you said. We're all going to have bad days. No matter what you do, there's going to be bad days. And you just got to learn that, recognize that. It's not all rainbows and butterflies, right? Life has problems.

Dr. Cam (31:15.356)

Yeah, absolutely. I love all of these. think this is about, and we'll put the link and all the information about the app in there, because I think that is a great tool, especially if you have a teen and if you do have a teen that is resistant to your suggestions and advice, you are not alone. In fact, you probably have more people that are like that than have kids that will listen. But if you have that, this is a great tool. Or finding somebody else that can teach them those, Not getting upset that they won't listen to you, but finding a way for them to access those tools is great.

Marc S Fussell (32:01.686)

Yes, and I think we set up a coupon code for you as well that's in your listeners can use Correct. Yep

Dr. Cam (32:06.758)

You did. It's just Dr. Cam. So put in Dr. Cam and you can get a discount. That's fantastic. Thank you for doing that. I love that. So what is one thing you want people to walk away with from this episode?

Marc S Fussell (32:19.709)

I think it's patience and kindness. think it's important for people, especially parents. You were kids once too. I was a kid once too. Kids can be frustrating. I was probably challenging when I was a child. I think just have some patience, have kindness, show love always, and that will go a long way to making them feel confident with talking to you. think love is an important part of it as well, letting them know that they are loved, that you care about them if they're going through a difficult time trying to help them in a loving way is I think they're in for

Dr. Cam (32:52.832)

That is so key. It's easy to love them when they're being compliant and good. It is very difficult sometimes to not that we don't love them, but to show that love when they're being difficult and that's when they need us the most. I love it. Thank you so much for joining us. I really, really appreciate it.

Marc S Fussell (33:01.027)

That was a great conversation. I appreciate being here. Thank you for having me again.

About the Show:

The Parenting Teens with Dr. Cam Podcast offers expert advice, real-world insights, and practical parenting strategies to help you navigate the challenges of raising teens. Dr. Cam, an adolescent psychologist, helps parents build strong relationships with their teens while supporting their emotional growth. Each episode provides actionable tips and tools to improve communication, handle teen behavior, and thrive together as a family. #ParentingTeens #MentalHealth #Teens #PositivePsychology #TakeTwoMinutes #DrCamCaswell