Ep 9: Teen Coping Skills: A Therapist's Guide to Conquering Stress & Anxiety

In today’s episode, we’re looking at another set of helpful skills - especially for teens and young adults - and those are coping skills. The transition to college or work from high school has its own special set of challenges and practicing some coping skills can really help feel more successful during this time. The executive function skill of emotional regulation, which is also called self-regulation, plays a really big part in coping with challenging situations. Emotional regulation is all about recognizing, managing, and responding to our emotions. I think this is one of the most challenging EF skills for us to learn and also one of the most important because it directly affects all areas of our lives. From the moment we wake up until we fall asleep, emotions influence our…well, everything! And learning to develop our emotional regulation from a young age will have a hugely positive impact on our lives. To learn more about emotional regulation and what coping skills might be particularly useful to teens and young adults, I invited Jackie Wolfman, a therapist in the Boston area, to join me for a conversation about this. Jackie teaches these coping skills to her clients through DBT, which stands for dialectical behavior therapy. I know, it’s a mouthful and also something you may not have heard of before. I myself had only seen the acronym but had no idea what it was, so I had to do a little research before my conversation with Jackie. DBT is related to CBT which you may have heard of before. If you haven’t, CBT stands for cognitive behavior therapy. In this type of therapy, you learn to recognize negative or unhelpful thought patterns and then challenge them and change them through certain actions, such as facing your fears and increasing your awareness of your behaviors. I’ll let Jackie explain more about DBT and how emotional regulation strategies used in this type of therapy are so effective for teaching teens and young adults these coping skills.