By Kevin Perez 

If the pandemic has taught us anything — it is resilience. It’s been a year since Florida’s first confirmed case of COVID-19 and nearly a year since the students of MDCPS have left their campuses for, what we thought, would be a few weeks.

Now, everything is different. 

We’ve spent a year social distancing and quarantining. We’ve missed out on milestones, parties, and just the routine hugs at lunch in the courtyard. But, each morning, we open our laptops and log in to school. We keep moving forward.

However, teenagers are not always 100% mentally and emotionally stable each day. It is important to stop and take a second throughout the day and ask yourself a few questions to make sure you are doing okay. Sometimes you might think you are okay when you’re not. 

It’s important to pay attention, not just to our parents and our teachers, but to ourselves. Check in with yourself and take some time to cope, to unwind, to destress.

Here are 5 questions to ask yourself daily:

From 1-10, How Stressed am I At This Moment? 

From a scale of 1-10, how stressed or anxious do you feel as of now? With this question, you allow yourself to take a second and think about how stressed you have been feeling today and why you are feeling stressed. Additionally, doing so allows you to come up with solutions that may essentially ease the stress you are experiencing. 

Am I tired? 

Most of the time the answer to this question is yes, but are you really tired? Sometimes we say we are tired when what we’re feeling is lack of motivation, or worse. So consider, are you getting enough sleep ? By asking yourself this you are led to analyze your sleep schedule and come to the realization that you need to fix it in order to get enough sleep. 

Am I currently happy? 

Are you currently satisfied? Or, are you sad and upset? If so, take a second and think about why you are not happy and see if you can eliminate the causes of your unhappiness. We tend to become our own enemies, more often than not. In such cases, completely eliminating a source of distress may not always hammer out. Take the first step by coming to terms with yourself.

What Am I Grateful For? 

What are you grateful for? Your family, friends? Taking time to reflect on what you have in life and feeling grateful for them can go a long way and lead to a positive mindset that, if sustained, throughout the day can continue for days. 

What Could I Have Done Better Today ? 

What could you have done better today? Each day there are things that we think back on and realize we could have acted on better. However, what are those things? Think about them and come up with ways to not make that same mistake again. 

These 5 simple questions can go a long way and give you the positive mindset needed to go through the day. By doing this, you are allowing yourself to take a couple minutes from each day and really think about your own thoughts and feelings. It provides you the opportunity to focus on what you can control and what positive aspects you can appreciate each day.