Mindfulness for Emerging Adults: Finding Balance, Belonging, Focus, and Meaning in the Digital Age

Finding balance, belonging, focus, and meaning in the digital age

Emerging Adults and Mindfulness Skills

If you are an emerging adult, identified as roughly between the ages of 18 and 25, the mindfulness skills you learn in this book will help you take control of stress and manage difficult emotions. Whether in a college classroom or not, living at home or on their own, emerging adults will become more grounded in the present moment. The result: more ease, contentment, and life satisfaction a state that positive psychologists refer to as well-being. Throughout the book, highlighted sections entitled Voices of Emerging Adults tell the stories of typical young adult struggles. These stories are a composite of tales from those in their late teens and twenties that Donna hears in her private therapy practice, with details changed to protect privacy. The most common themes are highlighted, such as finding intimacy (healthy relationships) in a digital world, managing debt, finding a fruitful and worthwhile career path, managing difficult emotions, and practicing self-care.

Maturity and growth most often happen outside of a therapist's office outside school and the classroom. One of the goals of Mindfulness for Emerging Adults is to help young adults identify mentors in different areas of their lives. With this in mind, Mindfulness for Emerging Adults is also written for parents, bosses, teachers, counselors, coaches, clergy, or other mentors of emerging young adults. Highlighted sections entitled Thoughts for Mentors will guide older adults to better relate to young adult challenges. Not intended for just their senior citizen friends, but for all those beyond their immediate age group, these sections provide direction for that help. By listening to the voices of modern teens and twenties, and by comparing their stories to the timeless developmental challenges of past generations, readers will be able to build greater understanding of the perennial journey to adulthood as seen through the eyes of today's emerging adults.

Mindfulness for Emerging Adults will inspire hope in young adults (teens, twenties, and millennials, in school or out) looking for the good life.

Emerging Adulthood, typically ages 18 - 25, has always been a time of intense transition and therefore a time of vulnerability and opportunity. Donna Torney masterfully weaves the time-tested, powerful, evidence-based concepts of mindfulness into today's rapidly changing, digitally-oriented world. Through evidence-based material that benefits all emerging adults: student or worker, late teens or twenties or millennials, Donna provides a guide through this difficult time.

Mindfulness for Emerging Adults explores the task of becoming an adult in the twenty-first century. Beginning in their teens and continuing through their twenties young people work to find their way. Torney begins by citing advances in neuroscience to encourage seeing mindfulness and other contemplative practices as indispensable life skills for late teens and twenty-somethings. These ancient and now rigorously researched practices are more important than ever in our age of accelerated change, media overload, and chronic busyness. With increased interest in mindfulness by the scientific community, we now have evidence that these practices create positive change in the mind and body. By exploring and adopting mindfulness and other contemplative practices which the author calls Center Points, emerging adults, teens, twenty-somethings, and millennials, whether they are students or in the workforce, can forge a path to find authentic identity, develop authentic relationships, and authentic, healthy personal and community connections, creating a good life in the digital age.

Donna Torney is a licensed psychotherapist specializing in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. She considers the effects of the mind on the body and the body on the mind when helping individuals work through situational challenges and everyday stress. Donna works with many emerging adults as well as established adults who are struggling to live in our fast-paced society with more peace and less anxiety. Trained at the University of New Hampshire during the "mindfulness revolution" when research on the brain/body benefits of mindfulness and related contemplative practices was exploding - Donna was at the heart of the movement.