Yet another heartbreaking incident of an Indian Television and film actor, Siddhartha Shukla has raised questions about the seemingly healthy and happy faces that are visible to us on the screen and show business. As we see, celebrities have been increasingly seen to face evident and hidden stress issues. Whether it is athletes like Simone Biles withdrawing from games like Tokyo Olympics or celebrities like Siddhartha Shukla succumbing to stress in show business, these incidents clearly indicate that there is a loophole in the mental and resilience training that youth must be versed with.
These were young celebrities who left us recently, that we are talking about. Siddhartha Shukla, known to be of the Big Boss 13 fame and even a supporting Bollywood actor, was just 40 years of age, known for his physique, and had a pretty homely lifestyle. But the heart attack that took his life is being attributed to increased stress levels and to some extent his smoking addiction. So, it seems that behind all that strong demeanour of his, there lay a vulnerability that he was unable to handle, and in addition, some addiction that did not do much good too to his mental health. This points out that our youth today aiming at different careers, some low stress-prone and some with high stress levels, is in clear need of being strengthened with Positive Education and Resilience training. Owing to lack of the same, they become easy targets and have to go through much suffering, and can even lose their lives.
Thus, Positive Education and Resilience training are not luxuries but lifesaving support systems of the day. By aiming at boosting and enabling youth to face real-world stress by standing strong in adverse and stressful situations is possible, the task at hand has become teaching them character strengths and life skills to deal with low phases.
What can relieve stress in high-stress situations?
Children can be taught how skills like bravery and courage can help to hold themselves up against others, and their competitors.
Children can be taught the real meaning of competition and that their only real competition is themselves. They can be taught to see competition as healthy and not as something creating stress.
Positive Education can teach kids to say no to addictions and to understand how these have an adverse impact on their health, both mental and physical. They can be discouraged from addictions and encouraged to deal with stress, using real-time resilience skills and character strengths.
Children can be trained to see beauty in small things and appreciate the beauty of life as a whole, rather than be caught up in a rat race, and in the compulsion of being number one every time.
They can be taught techniques for better communication, help-seeking, expressing their anxiety, calming down while stressed. Calming techniques like journaling and meditation can take them far, preventing them from having to lose their lives at young ages.
Children, while growing up and learning, if they make character strengths like humility, courage, zest, forgiveness, gratitude, etc. their nature, they will be able to stay away from the unbearable workplace stress, considering workplace stress is extremely high and even fatal these days.
Children, by learning to maintain a healthy daily routine, self-care routine, and healthy diet, etc. can keep heart conditions at bay which sneak in through the slightest cracks in young people’s lives these days.
To sum up, there are so many ways in which character strengths and resilience training can save lives in the present stress-prone environment of the day. Once grown up, it becomes difficult to make people understand simple things like a healthy mind, body, and the importance of life skills like resilience. Everybody thinks that bad things will never happen to them but when the going gets tough, they resort to addictions and seclusion. If they are trained and these strengths are practically ingrained in their personalities, it will make them stand against odd, stress and increase their longevity, needless to say ultimately decreasing the risk of heart attacks and drug abuse. So, you must take up to educating your children with life skills and positive education, and making sure they stand resilient and strong throughout their lives.