BlueFire Wilderness
Gooding, ID

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BlueFire Wilderness observes
Stress Awareness Month

BlueFire Wilderness promotes stress awareness through the healing powers of mindfulness exercises.

BlueFire Wilderness, a wilderness therapy program for struggling teens, discusses the benefits of practicing mindfulness to reduce stress in honor of Stress Awareness Month.

Stress is a regular part of life often exasperated by physiological, environmental, and external circumstances. It can impact an individual's ability to manage and function effectively.

In honor of Stress Awareness Month, BlueFire encourages others to practice mindfulness techniques. By practicing mindfulness, an individual can more effectively manage stress which can increase overall quality of life.

According to BlueFire Wilderness, mindfulness activities offer the following benefits:

• Calming the body down
• Slowing down heart rate
• Strengthening the immune system
• Decreasing depression, anxiety and posttraumatic responses
• Helping generate new neurons in the brain to develop internal resiliency.

Stress responses do the opposite of mindfulness and take away the reserves within the body to effectively manage difficult situations. When the body is stressed, it releases cortisol, the stress hormone.

Cortisol signals the body that something isn't right and the body goes into a defense mode which, oftentimes, feels like adrenaline or the fear response.

"The experience of mindfulness creates chemicals in the body such as endorphins that produce serotonin, the 'feel good' hormone that make us feel calm and relaxed," says Lydia Missal LCPC, Therapist at BlueFire Wilderness. "By regularly practicing mindfulness, an individual can build up stores of serotonin in order to combat and more effectively manage daily stressors that release cortisol. The body remembers this experience and thus creates a degree of resilience to adequately manage stressful situations."

Mindfulness activities include exercises like: deep breathing, alternate nostril breathing, visualization, guided imagery, and simple yoga poses.

"At BlueFire, we use mindfulness on a regular basis and see positive results from it," says Kathy Rex CTRS, Executive Director of BlueFire Wilderness therapy program, "These exercises assist students in developing an internal resilience to combat stress currently and in the future."

BlueFire Wilderness has helped hundreds of teens find healthy ways of coping with stress as well as other emotional and behavioral issues. As a leading program for helping struggling or troubled teens, BlueFire has witnessed firsthand the beneficial effects of using mindfulness to handle stress. In observance of Stress Awareness Month, BlueFire encourages others to utilize mindfulness in their daily routines to combat the potential ill effects of stress.

BlueFire Wilderness is a wilderness therapy program based just outside of Boise, Idaho that offers teens ages 11-17 a comprehensive adventure experience. BlueFire Wilderness combines clinical expertise, academic assessments and a family systems approach to help teens struggling emotional, behavioral and social challenges.