About
Mindfulness is a must have tool for all ages, the Stop, Breathe & Think platform offers a mindfulness app (IOS and Google versions available) for kids and adults.
“We are the emotional wellness platform for the “under 25” generation. At Stop, Breathe & Think, we believe that when more people find peace of mind, it makes the world a better place. Our mission is to help kids, teens and young adults build the emotional strength to tackle life’s ups and downs. Stop, Breathe & Think was born out of Tools for Peace, a non-profit dedicated to teaching the skills of mindfulness and meditation to inner-city teens.”
When launched, the app asks “How do you feel right now?” and invites the user to select feeling words from provided lists or emojis (kids version) so it can recommend a personalised selection of mindfulness activities and meditations.
Tougherthan mind
“How do I feel?” This has become a rather unchallenged social nicety, categorised along with all variations of the off-handed “how are you?“ which commonly elicits the unchecked, unexplored, auto-pilot reply of “fine”, sometimes with a clumsy “and you?” addition, until we allow ourselves the space to actually stop, breathe and think.
Emotions are linked with physical sensations; when we are excited we sometimes feel fidgety or energetic, when we’re sad we may describe it as being tired. Thoughts are also at the crux of emotions; if we are worried about a situation we may feel tense and clammy, when we’re remembering a happy memory we may find ourselves relaxed and light. Background conditioning creates space for emotional vocabulary but without the foundation, and exercising of it, it can be challenging to think beyond our peripheral words to address physical sensations and subsequently identify our feelings. I can attest that stepping into my first self conversation on how I was feeling proved very difficult. How WAS I feeling?!! Because of this very quandary I was drawn to the Kids version of the app as my jumping off point into the SBT mindfulness platform – a way of exploring their approach to simplified emotional vocabulary.
Through regular “checking in” on how we‘re feeling we can grow not only our emotional wordbank but also our awareness of what triggers certain feelings, and thus reactions, within us. Thinking of emotions as a high-wire exercise it’s easier to better appreciate the need for balance. Acknowledging ALL of our feelings is vital for self-concept: there are pros and cons to every emotion, and therefore learning to regulate our emotional intensity is equally as important as feeling them. Growing awareness, emotional regulation, within ourselves and of our outward environment helps ground our perspective reducing reactivity whilst still honouring our feels. Mindfulness tools such as Stop, Breathe and Think, help us to self-navigate our feelings through recognising that a short change in activity is enough to reset our emotional channel. Check out this app and see how you feel.