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Health & Exercise

The Role of Exercise in Teen Depression Treatment

Teen depression is a complex disease that doesn’t always respond to traditional therapeutic approaches. Many mental health treatment providers use a trial-and-error approach to establish what works and what doesn’t for each client. Initially, the therapies treatment centers use include antidepressant medications and talk therapy, such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Complementary approaches like exercise also can be important tools to help manage depression in adolescents. Exercise can offer relief

January 7, 2020

Exercise, Sleep, and Adolescents

Over the past two years, we’ve published four articles on the role sleep plays in the lives of adolescents. One article was about sleep in a second-hand way. We talked about the impact of school start times on academic performance among teenagers in Seattle. Later start times meant more sleep, which translated into better graders for the teens. Read that article here: Delayed High School Start Times in Seattle: Positive

December 31, 2019

DBT, Fitness, and Depression

While exercise has not yet been shown to cure any mental health disorder on its own, there are mountains of evidence showing its benefits on mood, self-concept, and work ethic. Exercise has a huge effect on a teen’s emotional wellbeing and even improves cognition. It also has a host of physical benefits: it increases heart rate, reduces stress, improves sleep, lowers blood pressure, and increases energy. How Exercise Helps with

September 30, 2019

Teen Athletes: Are They More Likely to Have Substance Abuse and Mental Health Issues?

Sports have a host of benefits for teens. From social advantages to academic enrichment to physical health, it seems like there’s nothing better than playing on your high school team. At the same time, there’s a dark underbelly in the world of teen athletics. Research looking at thousands of teen athletes around America has produced some slightly unsettling correlations. This data shows that while high school athletes are at higher

September 3, 2019

Are Certain Sports Making My Teen Aggressive?

Note: this is just one part of our series on Sports: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, where we discuss all the ways athletic participation can influence teens. Read our previous articles here and here. The most aggressive sports player in history might arguably be Jack Tatum. Tatum was a football player with the Oakland Raiders. He was so violent that his nickname was “Assassin.” In 1978, Tatum collided

August 29, 2019

The Benefits of Sports for Teens

Eight million teens played sports in high school last year, based on a survey by the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS). That was a record-breaking high. In fact, the number of high school athletes has been increasing for the last three decades. With so many adolescents playing sports, it’s worthwhile to talk about the various benefits athletics bestows upon teens. Here’s a list of why getting involved

August 23, 2019

Kids, PE Class, and Motivation: What Matters?

When Do Kids Stop Liking PE? A group of researchers in Switzerland studied a group of 1,200 kids age 8-12 for two years to determine their feelings about their physical education (PE) classes. The researchers launched the study to examine possible explanations for the worldwide trend in youth obesity and overweight. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), there were over 41 million children under the age of five who

August 2, 2019

Team Sports, Adverse Childhood Experiences, and Mental Health

A story published by National Public Radio (NPR) in May caught our attention. Here’s the headline: “Playing Teen Sports May Protect From Some Damages of Childhood Trauma” Like many things we see in the media that intersect with our specialty – helping adolescents struggling with mental health and/or substance use disorders – we thought to ourselves: “Hmmm. Interesting – if true.” It turns out that this interesting piece of news

July 22, 2019

Exercise for Children With ADHD

Increasing Prevalence of ADHD Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has been a hot topic in education, pediatric medicine, and parenting for decades. The condition has been known in various forms by various names for at least a hundred years, but the current definition was crystallized in the year 2000 by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in their definitive publication “The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition” (DSM-IV)

July 3, 2019

How the Mediterranean Diet Can Help a Teen with Depression

If you have been diagnosed with depression, there are a number of lifestyle changes you can make that can help your treatment progress. One is diet. Specifically, the Mediterranean diet. A Spanish study analyzed the effects of the Mediterranean diet on almost 10,000 participants. Results found a correlation of the diet to a reduced risk of depression. This diet, inspired by the culinary fares of Italy, Greece, and Spain, emphasizes

May 29, 2019