Resources Supporting Healthy Youth Lifestyles

Introduction:

Successful prevention requires addressing co-occurring health risks of youth and young adults, including substance use, chronic disease and mental illness risk behaviors. 

The most efficient strategy to do this is to integrate substance use prevention with healthy lifestyle behavior promotion.

That is why we provide prevention and health specialists and parents with evidence-informed resources aimed at enhancing youth and young adult wellness habits, including physical activity and sports, healthy nutrition, sleep, controlling stress, goal setting and spirituality, while preventing their substance use.

These resources are perfect for supporting the achievement of health behavior goals young people set during their participation in evidence-based Prevention Plus Wellness screening and brief interventions.

They are also ideal for prevention specialists interested in broadening their program outcomes by targeting other health risks common among young people. 

Prevention Plus Wellness resources address increasing and improving physical activity and sports participation, healthy nutrition, getting adequate sleep, controlling daily stress, setting and monitoring goals, spirituality and mental health, while understanding risks associated with substance use, including vaping e-cigarettes and using marijuana.

In addition to these national web-based resources, we highly recommend prevention and health organization compile a list of the local resources supporting each of the specific wellness-promoting behaviors and preventing specific substance use habits among young people. 

If you have a youth group, this would make a great assignment for them to learn leadership and service skills.