By Marcus Zouroudis
In an era of excessive teenage social media use and pressure to succeed in the Higher School Certificate, Dr Diana Adis Tahhan’s work is making a difference in guiding teenagers to make more informed life decisions.
Dr Diana is a multidiscipline therapist and founder of Sydney Healing and Research Centre who is devoting her career to help young people find calm by better managing their social media use and the pressure of a results-driven high school environment.
As a therapist she observes the life of our current generation of teenagers and sees they are lacking a strong foundation with phones and social media occupying their attention.
“Teenagers are having trouble understanding who they are and what their true purpose is because of the noise of the world,” Dr Diana told The Greek Herald.
“Device use occupying time, time spent on social media, poor habits, phones at night watching YouTube and being on Facetime in bed.”
Social media and teenage stress
Dr Diana has clients experiencing stress because of poor learned habits over their child to teenage years.
“Young people come to me in a high state of stress and a lot of this has to do with poor habits that they may have unintentionally developed over the years,” Dr Diana said.
She expressed social media and device use is having a detrimental effect on the teenage mind and quality of life.
“Their use of social media and other apps is creating a mind-numbing effect permeating areas of their lives,” she said.
Her approach is to help teenagers respond to their body’s physical reactions, and she is teaching methods to help ease stress. She provides tools to set healthy habits by reducing social media and phone use and bring in simpler ways of living each day.
“Part of my approach to help young people is to teach about our bodies stress response and help them find ways to relax and calm. One way I do this is to help them get out of fight flight and access their relaxation response,” she explained.
“I give them a variety of tools that helps them become mindful and intentional in their daily life and help them establish new habits and daily patterns. Critically understanding and detoxing from social media and phone use becomes a natural part of this process.”
“What kind of cyberworld am I entering which is not allowing me to relax,” is one of the critical questions she raises during her sessions. “Where is this world taking me to? What is it taking me away from? What is it numbing me from?”
She helps young people experiencing the challenges of adolescence to have a more basic life and question the world’s standards of physical beauty and attractiveness.
“My advice to young people experiencing challenges would be to try to have a more basic life and a critical lens to understand the world and its distractions,” she said.
“Learning to be more critical of what the world says is successful and alluring, and beautiful brings an important perspective and helps us find meaning and connect with a greater purpose.”
Teenage nutrition and chemical intake
Dr Diana approaches her sessions with teenagers in a multifaceted way, looking at the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual components of their health.
She encourages teenagers to be critical of their diet and improve nutrition by developing an awareness of chemical content in foods and energy drinks whilst stressing the need to increase physical activity and change sleep patterns.
She focuses a lot on critical thinking and helping teenagers make more informed life choices.
“I teach teenagers to become more critical because they have become numb to things going on around them,” Dr Diana said.
“Teenagers need to also ask themselves: Am I moving? Am I active? What am I allowing into my body? What chemicals are coming into my body? How am I using my body? Are the thoughts I am allowing harming my body?”
HSC pressure
Dr Diana is aware of the stress teenagers have in Year 12 in a results-driven environment and helps them to realise alternate pathways available.
“I am aware of the pressure and burden put on teenagers with the HSC and worrying about choosing the right subjects and achieving a high ATAR,” she said.
“I see the emotional, physical and mental toll this takes and it is important teenagers know there are various pathways to success.
“Having a healthy approach to life changes teenage years, but also has changes that will reverberate into the future.”
Dr Diana is passionate about her therapy, describing it as a labour of love helping her teenage patients develop better habits to find greater purpose and increased joy.
Dr Diana is author of The Truth About High School, published in 2024
