'Lifting the veil:' Calm found in teen-tailored mindfulness training

Aug. 12—TRAVERSE CITY — Rod Meyers was struggling with stress and anxiety when he saw a flier on a bulletin board at his school for a program called "Stressed Teens."

The flier claimed that the mindfulness training offered by the program could help Meyers, a sophomore at Grand Traverse Academy, work through the problems he was dealing with.

Meyers joined Stressed Teens with a certain measure of skepticism. He is logic-oriented, and he felt that eight weeks of mindfulness may be too spiritual for him.

"The first couple classes, despite me being doubtful about them, I felt so much calmer afterwards, it was ridiculous," Meyers said.

Meyers was later diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. At the time he took Stressed Teens, he didn't have the words for the issues he was dealing with, but even then, the class presented him with a calmness he had not yet known.

"It essentially provided a baseline for me that I didn't realize I could get to, because I've always constantly been stressed for my whole life and I didn't even know I could be calm," Meyers said. "It kind of lifted the veil, and I realized like, 'Oh my god, I could be so much happier right now.'"

For the past seven years, Wendy Weckstein, a physical therapist, certified wellness consultant and certified teacher of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, has led MBSR classes for adults and teenagers at Northern Michigan Psychiatric Services in Traverse City, where she is the director of wellness.

About 15 years ago, Weckstein attended an eight-week MBSR program herself to work through the stress she had been accumulating from her job and personal life at the time. She was resistant at first, but about three weeks in, she opened up.

"Something was triggered," Weckstein said. "Some switch was flipped."

The program changed her life, and she wanted to help others experience the same thing, she said.

With a passion for teaching and a master's degree in education already under her belt, Weckstein dove into a five-year training program at Brown University to get her certification in MBSR and, later, her certification in MBSR for teenagers, or MBSR-T.

The work has been a "privilege," she said.

"It's just extremely rewarding to witness change and to witness people entering into this journey and discovering the possibilities that mindfulness can bring," Weckstein said.

According to the National Library of Medicine, MBSR is a secular meditation and stress reduction program developed by Professor Jon Kabat-Zinn in the late 1970s that is used across the world for stress management and to help individuals cope with chronic mental and physical illnesses. Kabat-Zinn developed the program out of research into medicine, psychology and Buddhism.

In the early 2000s, Gina Biegel created the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Teens Program, or MBSR-T or Stressed Teens. It's a version of MBSR that is more developmentally appropriate for teenagers.

According to an article published in the North American Journal of Medical Sciences, the results of several studies done on individuals who have taken MBSR, indicate that the program helps people cope with a variety of clinical problems.

During the eight weeks of the Stressed Teens program, Weckstein walks her students through guided mindfulness meditations, yoga, creative projects and group discussions. Outside of class, Weckstein encourages her students to integrate mindfulness into their everyday lives to establish healthy practices they can take with them when the eight weeks of the program is over.

"Every teen should be going through a class like this. It's just so essential," Weckstein said. "They're learning skills and cultivating skills that most adults will never learn in their life, and these are tools and inner resources that provide them with this inner strength, this agency, that's going to allow them to navigate through the challenges of their life."

In MBSR, mindfulness is the act of bringing attention to your thoughts and surroundings with acceptance and curiosity and without judgment, Weckstein said. Our minds are prone to leaving the current moment and fixating on the past or future, but mindfulness draws an individual's focus to the present.

Recently, the effects of the pandemic have also been a prominent topic in Stressed Teens.

As previously reported, social services in the area have seen the ways in which the pandemic has negatively impacted youth mental health, as young people struggled in a world of heightened stressors that they have had to navigate through the pandemic.

In May 2021, Northern Lakes Community Mental Health (NLCMH) saw 124 children for crisis counseling or inpatient services — triple what the organization saw in the same month a year prior.

In the past two years, Weckstein said she has seen deeper levels of anxiety, self-doubt and self deprecation and more self-harming behaviors and maladaptive coping mechanisms in her Stressed Teens groups.

The initial isolation of the pandemic was difficult, but re-entering normal routines also caused a lot of stress and anxiety in teenagers, too. Weckstein found that, in her groups, many teenagers grew comfortable being at home and not having to deal with the stresses of social interaction to the point that leaving the home to return to "normalcy" also presented hardships.

Anxiety, hopelessness and stress lead to unhealthy patterns of behavior, but with the consistent practice of mindfulness, individuals may be able to respond to the stressors in their lives in a healthier way, Weckstein said. Unhealthy eating patterns, self harm or even abundant technology or social media usage are examples of unhealthy behaviors that people can fall into, Weckstein said.

"Mindfulness has the potential to help us navigate through life's inevitable challenges with more ease, a greater level of calmness and the ability to see things with more clarity," Weckstein said.

For Meyers, practicing mindfulness gave him a clearer head and calmed the constant chatter in his brain. He still thinks of a project he did in Stressed Teens where they filled jars with glitter and water to make snow-globe-like objects. When you shake it, the jar is clouded with glitter until it settles again and the water clears.

In the class, students are taught to think of the jar as their mind and the glitter as their clouded thoughts. Weckstein often walks students through a mindfulness meditation where they watch the glitter swirl through the jar and eventually settle.

At first when the glitter jar was introduced, Meyers laughed at it. But during the meditation, the imagery of it helped him calm down. He still uses it once in a while, he said.

"It really does help me remember to, like, just chill out for a second," he said.

Now, Meyers is a sophomore at Northwestern Michigan College. He continues to handle his social anxiety with exercises he learned at Stressed Teens — and the adult MBSR class that Weckstein offers, which he took later — and he tries to practice mindfulness every once in a while.

Overall, taking Stressed Teens opened him up to taking better care of himself.

"It really helped silence my brain fighting itself," he said.

Stressed Teens classes are capped at 20 people, and are held in the fall, spring and winter. Participants can join virtually or in person. Weckstein's next program runs from Sept. 21 to Nov. 9, and it takes place on Wednesdays from 4 to 6 p.m. For more information on classes, individuals can visit www.minfulnesstc.com.