Austin Scholar #51: How Your Teen Can Outsmart Their Brain
Hey, y'all!
Instead of doing a separate update, anecdote, and article for this week's newsletter, this week I'm combining all three. I have a lot to share with you, and I'm excited to dive in.
A few weeks ago, I got a request from one of my subscribers to write a newsletter on the book Outsmart Your Brain–so that’s what I’m doing this week. This book is mainly targeted toward educators and instructors, so I translated some of the concepts for parents to make them teen-friendly.
If anyone else has a request for a newsletter, send it over! I had such a fun time writing this one and I would love to answer any other questions y’all might have.
How Your Teen Can Outsmart Their Brain
Outsmart Your Brain covers a lot of ground – everything from test prep and notetaking to managing self-confidence. I chose a few of the topics most applicable to teenagers (and I’ll be honest, most interesting to me) to write about here.
In this article, I’m covering:
How to work through anxiety and self-confidence
How to plan your work, defeat procrastination, and stay focused
How to study for exams
I personally found all these tips extremely helpful and plan to implement the ones I’m not already using into my own work, so this might be a good newsletter to forward directly to your teen.
How to work through anxiety and self-confidence
So many kids struggle with anxiety and a lack of self-confidence in school.
Like me, for example. This week, I got stuck in a devastating anxiety loop where I had extreme thoughts of how behind I was, how I was going to fail, and how everyone was going to be disappointed in me.
The thoughts paralyzed me so much that I couldn’t start doing any schoolwork, which led to me being more and more frustrated and behind.
I spent the entire week unable to make progress on my goals.
The last few chapters of Outsmart Your Brain focus on these topics of anxiety and self-confidence, and obviously, I resonated with them a lot.
Here were a few of the core points: