Teen Mental Wellness Day and our Equine Facilitated Wellness project

On Teen Mental Health Day we have been thinking about mental health and how we all need a little bit of help sometimes. Equine assisted wellness is something we have seen help young people and teenagers going through challenging times

Today, March 2, is World Teen Mental Wellness Day, and we wanted to take the opportunity to share how we have seen positive results from teenagers who have come to Stable Life with challenges which were affecting their mental health.

We see every day how being a teenager is an increasingly complicated and difficult time of life to navigate, from screens and social media sending messages about the way people are supposed to be presenting themselves, to the physical issues around growing up in a fast-changing world where we are all more connected than ever, but there is also an epidemic of loneliness.

Here at Stable Life we provide a safe space for children and young people to work out some of their challenges using the horses and ponies we work alongside and the beautiful landscape around us.

The intuitive nature of horses is an amazing part of what we do – horses aren’t judging you on the normal set of criteria used by humans; instead they are looking at you from an equine point of view, and as an individual that can make you think about how you present yourself to the world.

Being with a horse can be a brilliant learning experience, or just a relaxing one: one of the exercises we do with the young people is ask them to lean over the horse’s back and just feel the rhythm of the breath of the animal, and try to follow it themselves. This simple exercise helps people to slow down, and reset their nervous systems, which has a hugely beneficial effect on both the body and the brain.

There is a great deal of documented evidence devoted to how being outdoors in nature, spending time with animals, and building exercise into your routine can help your mental health, whoever you are and whatever stage of life you are at – this short BBC video explains some of the ways equine assisted wellness can help people as well, which is what we try to do.

All of which is just to say that if you’re spending time with a teenager today try to check in on them, and if you’re a teenager yourself, try giving yourself a minute without your phone, and then a pat on the back. It’s not the easiest stage in life, but it doesn’t last forever either.