Lucero’s wellness app is designed to make the journey of self-discovery easy and fun,  because self-discovery creates confidence, maintains mental health, and leads to lifelong well-being. Here are four key ways self-discovery guides tweens and teens towards confidence:

1. Self-discovery strengthens their capacity for self-care.

Learning how to take care of themselves mentally, physically and emotionally is a big part of tweens and teens becoming independent young adults. Self-care requires figuring out what they need to maintain their own well-being, manage stress, and find balance. As they come to value their uniqueness, adolescents get more skilled at identifying their own needs and understanding how their needs may differ from those of other people. Increased confidence also helps tweens and teens get comfortable meeting their own needs and asking others for support.

2. Self-discovery supports self-regulation.

Lucero’s model draws from the research of Albert Bandura, who found that people learn to change their behavior, in part, through self-reflection. Reflecting on feelings and how they affect behavior begins with naming emotions, a strategy Dan Siegel calls “Name it to tame it.” Neuroimaging research shows that labeling an emotion reduces activity in the amygdala, an area of the brain responsible for processing emotions. As tweens and teens get better at managing their emotions, they learn that they have control of their emotional state, which leads to more confidence.

3. Self-discovery helps them make better decisions.

The prefrontal cortex– responsible for self-control, impulse regulation, and other executive functioning skills– is still developing in teens. At the same time, increased hormones fire up the brain’s pleasure-seeking mesolimbic system. This Dual Systems Model explains why tweens and teens often struggle with making wise decisions. Self-discovery helps them make decisions based on their own beliefs, values, and goals instead of looking to others for answers. Anchored in self-awareness, a confident adolescent is less likely to just “go along with the crowd” or take a risk that jeopardizes their physical or emotional safety. And practice making decisions expands tweens’ and teens’ capacity for responsibility and confidence.

4. Self-discovery leads to a sense of purpose.

“The biggest problem growing up today is not stress, it’s meaninglessness,” says Stanford School of Education professor and psychologist William Damon. “We all need a purpose, but at that formative period of life, when you don’t even know who you are, you really need it.” Damon defines purpose as a goal that’s both “meaningful to the self and consequential to the world beyond the self.” Thus, self-discovery and purpose are intrinsically linked. When tweens and teens have opportunities to explore their curiosities, talents, and passions, they’re more likely to find activities and connections that give them a sense of purpose and build their confidence.

Lucero helps adolescents engage in self-discovery with gamified, bite-sized tools to explore their inner and outer worlds, created by licensed clinical therapists and a team of youth advisors. Our approach to self-discovery makes it easy for tweens and teens to develop self-awareness and learn emotional regulation skills, growing their confidence with each and every step.

Adolescence is the perfect time to develop conscious living skills because tweens and teens undergo brain changes that make them better at metacognition. Sometimes called “thinking about your thinking,” metacognition allows teens to be more aware of their thoughts, feelings, habits and behaviors and their power to change them. It can help teens make good decisions, choose healthy habits and live with greater self-awareness. Here are just a few of the ways conscious living benefits teens:

1. They know what matters most.

As teens begin to invest more in relationships with peers, they may feel pressured to go along with others over staying true to their own values and beliefs. Living consciously reminds teens that external approval doesn’t matter as much as feeling good about themselves. Above all, conscious living keeps teens aware that they always have a choice: they can consider all their options and make decisions based on what matters most to them.

1. They get goal-oriented.

The opposite of conscious living is going through life on autopilot, feeling lost or powerless to direct the course of your own life. It’s natural for teens to feel like they lack power at times, and many struggle to find a sense of direction and purpose. Conscious living empowers teens with tools to set goals and become more independent, responsible and self-motivated. They can define what success and fulfillment look like to them and chart their own course, one step at a time.

1. They can take charge, and let go.

Living consciously means taking charge of the things you have control over and letting go of the things you don’t. Teens learn that they are in charge of their own thoughts, words, behavior, choices and mistakes, and that they can’t control the thoughts, words, behavior, choices or mistakes of others. That helps them recognize when to take action and where they can change things. Then they respond to challenges by acting on what they can control, instead of getting frustrated by the things they can’t.

1. They grow their social-emotional intelligence. 

Being self-aware helps teens become more aware of others, too. Teens who practice conscious living are more likely to develop compassion, empathy and the ability to regulate emotions. Strong interpersonal skills help teens build healthy relationships and find a sense of belonging. Research shows that these solid connections with others provide powerful protection from depression, anxiety and other mental health disorders in teens.

1. They find an inner sanctuary.

Living consciously teaches healthy habits that help teens stay grounded in themselves, no matter what is going on in their outside lives or the world around them. From mindful breathing and positive self-talk to exercise and spending quality time with friends, teens learn to prioritize self-care and return to stabilizing routines whenever life gets tough. Having an inner sanctuary builds emotional resilience, protects teens’ mental health, and locks in positive practices they’ll take with them into adulthood.

…and here are some self-care tools we include in Lucero to help

To make living consciously a daily habit, teens need self-care reminders just like the rest of us. That’s why we built Lucero, a gamified wellness app built for teens and tweens. It includes personalized, teen-focused, therapist-approved suggestions for self-care, like:

• watching calming ASMR videos
• taking breaks to be active or go outside
• writing about a stressful situation and turning it into confetti

Each time teens try out a new self-care suggestion, they add more tools to their conscious living toolkit and build lasting healthy habits.