Below are 7 ways schools, families, organizations and communities can target healthy behaviors to prevent youth substance use and improve mental and physical wellbeing.
- Offering healthy and constructive alternatives to drug use.
Healthy alternatives can include opportunities for youth to participate in pro-social activities, such as sports, physical activities and games, art, music, cooking, clubs, camps, and skill-building events that engage youth to enhance social skills, motivation for life-long learning and healthy behavior development, and increase self-control.
- Creating supportive physical and social environments.
Supportive environments can include community and organizational commitment to support physical environments such as playgrounds and parks and social environments like clubs and youth groups that encourage and support broad positive youth development.
- Teaching how healthy behaviors protect against substance use and improve mental and physical wellbeing, performance, happiness and self-image.
Educating youth about how a range of different healthy behaviors, including physical activity, health eating, sleep and stress control improve mental and physical wellbeing, performance in sports, school and work, happiness and enhance self-image and self-worth.
- Teaching how specific types of substance use interferes with participating in healthy behaviors and improving self-image and achieving personal goals.
Educating youth about how alcohol, tobacco, e-cigarettes, marijuana, non-medical opioids and other drug consumption harms a person’s ability to participate in healthy behaviors and robs them of reaching desired, positive self-images and achieving personal health and wellness goals.
- Giving youth opportunities to reflect on their current health risk and protective behaviors, including substance use and healthy habits and creating concrete actions to improve them.
Providing surveys and asking youth questions about their various current substance use and healthy behaviors, as well as how they can improve specific healthy habits to increase personal reflection and motivation for change and personal improvement.
- Giving youth opportunities to set and monitor behavior goals to avoid substance use and increase healthy habits.
Helping youth set and commit to short term (e.g., weekly) goals and providing them with tools like calendar logs to aid them in monitoring their goal achievement related to avoiding substance use and increasing healthy habits to reach health and fitness recommendations regarding physical activity, healthy nutrition, sleep and stress control.
- Rewarding youth for setting, monitoring and achieving healthy behavior goals to increase their self-regulation skills and self-efficacy.
Providing youth with incentives and rewards to reinforce their setting, monitoring and achieving healthy behavior goals, like having another person co-sign their goal plan, offering motivational aroma scented stickers, and using group/classroom goal setting charts to track individual and group goal achievement.
Prevention Plus Wellness (PPW) provides screening and brief interventions that can be provided to youth and young adults in a single session (30-45 minutes in length) in school, healthcare, community, and home settings which target multiple health behaviors for preventing substance use and promoting positive youth development.
PPW also offers goal setting resources to increase motivation to set, monitor, and achieve personal goals to avoid substance use and increase healthy behaviors to enhance self-control skills and self-efficacy as well as improve mental and physical wellbeing, performance, happiness and positive self-image.
Learn more about PPW programs and resources: https://preventioinpluswellness.com