Emotional Wellness in High School: Mental Health in Teens

October is Emotional Wellness Month! Taking time out of a busy school season to recognize emotional wellness means spending time disconnecting and giving the brain some TLC. Maintaining a healthy emotional balance helps high schoolers to make healthy choices, have good relationships, avoid burnout, and achieve their goals.

Emotional health is one aspect of mental health. It reflects one’s ability to cope with positive and negative emotions and become more aware of how feelings affect you. Poor emotional health can lead to various mental and physical ailments that may interfere with students’ day-to-day lives. Below are a few tips to bolster the emotional wellness of high school students.

1. Get Sleep

It’s no secret that high school students like staying up late. For years there has been literature about early class start times for high schoolers having detrimental effects on their sleep patterns. One solution is to go to bed earlier, but for many, that piece of advice is either ignored or simply impractical. If a student works a job in the evenings, for example, they may not be able to observe an earlier bedtime.

The Rose Academies is among the very few high schools that prioritize student sleep. By offering three session times throughout the day, students can pick the start time that works best for them. Getting adequate sleep certainly helps to improve performance in school and overall mood, making it a key component of maintaining emotional wellness.

2. Be Mindful

Being “present” helps to regulate emotions, helping students to process what they’re feeling without becoming overwhelmed. Time spent in high school is often very future-focused, with goals of graduation, college, and career at the forefront of students’ minds.

While setting goals is integral to a Rose Academy curriculum, our staff is committed to meeting students right where they are and designing a graduation plan that fits the student’s timeline. This helps students to focus on what’s right in front of them with less worry about the future (which can lead to overwhelm and burnout). Keeping high school students confidently engaged while working towards a larger goal is one way a Rose education fosters emotional wellness.

3. Allow Space to Grieve

Grief is a universal emotion that everyone experiences. We often associate grief with losing a loved one, but grief can result from any struggle with loss. This may include loss of identity, the loss of a future you had imagined for yourself, or the loss of a relationship. Grief takes many forms and can come up even in the circumstances deemed “not that bad” by others. 

Grief is a complex emotion experienced by many high schoolers. The temptation to mute those feelings and carry on with school as usual could be detrimental in the long run, resulting in both acute and chronic health issues. 

At the Rose Academies, students are more than just another name on a roster. With smaller class sizes and student bodies, every staff member knows each student by name and their story, support needs, and goals. At Rose, we take a more whole-person approach than traditional high schools, recognizing that students have lives outside of school. Achieving emotional wellness is an ongoing process, and at Rose, we aim to maintain the flexibility and support needed for each student to thrive.

To learn more about what makes a Rose Academy education different, we invite you to continue exploring our website.