Your brain is the machinery, the command and control computer that runs your life.

That’s why everyone of us should know as much about it as possible, to get as much from it as possible, and especially our teens.

“Understanding the teen brain should be part of the education curriculum for teenagers..it’s empowering for young people to know and understand more about why they might be feeling a certain way.” Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Cambridge.

 

We all need to know:

 

• just the simple basics of how the brain works, what it likes and dislikes, what hurts it and what helps it.
• How moods, feelings, and emotions happen in the brain and how we can take better control over them.
• How to manage our thoughts and our thinking so that they don’t become negative, stressful, unhealthy, and even dangerous.
• How things like certain foods and certain exercises are so good for brain health and function.
• The things we can all do to help improve routine daily chores, like memory, decision making, executive function.
• How negative thinking patterns like stress can do long term damage to the brain and how we can think ourselves out of that pattern.
• How learning can change the structure of the brain, make it healthier, help it to perform better, and even help ward off cognitive decline like dementia.
• How we can learn to process the deluge of information we process every day the 10s of thousands of thoughts, so we can separate the good from the bad, the important from the irrelevant.
• How mental illnesses work in the mind and the brain and what we can do to help prevent them or to help manage them.
• The role of happiness in everything from health to success, and how we can each build our own program to harness it.
• How spiritual values can alter the brain and improve our mental health.
• The connection between the gut and the brain and breathing and the brain and how to control both.

The payoff could be huge

The science is very clear. As humans we have far more control over our brain and our lives, and over our lives through our brain, than we think.

And in many ways it’s because we simply don’t know how much control we have. It’s so important for teens to understand how things like mood, positive thinking, motivation, optimism, happiness, and so much more, happen in the brain, can change their lives, and can be significantly controlled by their attitude.