Ep 50: Teenagers Under Pressure

Lisa Damour, bestselling author of Untangled and Under Pressure, reveals a startling trend on this episode: stress and anxiety are on the rise among teenage girls. Learn why this is happening and what parents can do about it from the psychologist who writes the adolescence column for the New York Times.

Full show notes

Imagine this:

Your young teen has been practicing piano for almost a year now, and his teacher is holding a recital for all the students. Your teen has just found out about the recital, and wants out.

The thought of performing a skill he’s just starting to learn in front of an audience is stressing him out. He’d rather just not go, and asks if he can have another year to practice before the next recital. You agree to let your teen skip this year’s recital and try again next year, but then what happens?

When next year’s recital date is announced, your teen is more stressed out than the last time! What happened? He’s had a whole extra year to practice, and you can hear from your own eavesdropping that he is in fact twice as good as he was a year before. But he doesn’t want to perform, and he’s mega stressed out about it.

When parents don’t have strategies for comprehensive teenage stress management, there can be devastating long term consequences for the child. If kids are taught that feelings of stress and anxiety are bad feelings to be avoided, then avoiding those feelings is what they will become experts at.

One day, however, those feelings of stress and anxiety will be unavoidable. Your teen’s friends may want him to join their band, or try out for their orchestra. Of course he wants to play music with his friends, but if he’s been avoiding live performances all these years, then what’s to stop him from having a full-blown panic attack?

Learning to teach teenage stress management isn’t straight forward. It’s hard to imagine the long term consequences of seemingly inconsequential choices. So to better understand the complexities of teenage stress management, I got on the phone with New York Times bestselling author, Lisa Damour, Ph.D.

On top of being a bestselling author for her two books, Untangled and Under Pressure, Lisa writes the monthly Adolescence column for the New York Times. She maintains her own private psychotherapy practice, she’s a regular contributor to CBS News, and she’s an international speaker and consulter. Oh! And she’s a mother. Not surprisingly, she had a lot to say on this episode about teenage stress management.

Anxiety Isn’t Always Bad

Lisa says that if parents learn only one thing about teenage stress management, it’s this: Psychologists see stress and anxiety as normal, healthy functions.

More often than not, anxiety is your friend. It’s one of your body’s alarm systems that tells you when you need to pay attention and keep yourself safe. If you were driving, and the car ahead of you were swerving back and forth, Lisa would be more concerned if you weren’t having an anxiety attack at that moment. Your body’s alarm system should compel you to respond. Get away from the swerving car!

The same goes for teenagers. If a teen comes to Lisa and says they’re feeling anxious about an upcoming performance, and she learns they haven’t been practicing, then she says,

“Good! You’re having the right reaction to being unprepared!”

Even if the teen did practice for their performance, Lisa says it’s good for them to feel a bit anxious. Research shows that a little anxiety improves performance, and we want our kids to do a good job. She says you don’t want your kid to be in a total zen state before going into a test, performance, or competition. You want them to be a bit “revved up” by some stress.

Anxiety is good because it protects you. It gets your juices flowing. Anxiety makes you do those tasks you’ve been procrastinating, or not taking seriously. Sure, it doesn’t feel good, but neither does exercise, and no one is saying that exercise is bad for you!

There are times when anxiety can be bad, and Lisa helped me understand when that is. She says anxiety is bad when the alarms don’t make sense, and when the alarm is hugely out of proportion to the event. You don’t want your teen having full blown panic attacks over small quizzes. Also, if your teen is feeling anxious all the time, and nothing is wrong, then there’s something faulty with their body’s alarm system.

Most times, though, anxiety is a good thing. But how does knowing this help us parents better understand teenage stress management? How can we help our teenager who is really concerned about that upcoming piano recital? These are the exact questions that drove Lisa to write her book!

Here’s what NOT to do…

Avoidance is Your Worst Option

The one strategy that’s most likely to heighten anxiety is avoidance. Lisa points out, though, that avoidance is often people’s first instinct when faced with anxiety.

When your teen is stressed out about that piano recital, it’s easy as a parent to think it’s no big deal. What’s the harm in letting them skip that one performance? But here’s the problem: the first thing your teen is going to feel when you make their problem disappear is glorious relief. They’re going to feel great! So when the next recital comes around, their brain is going to scream, “Give me that fabulous relief I had before!”

We don’t want to set our teens up for future avoidances. The more your teen avoids recitals, the bigger and scarier they become until their anxiety turns into full blown stage fright. They instead need to seek teenage stress management strategies that can help them confront challenges like this.

Go Against Their Instinct

The goal of teenage stress management is to teach teens that they have a TON of strategies for dealing with their stress. Lisa says it helps to go against their instinct. You can say,

“Look, avoiding this recital is a phenomenal short term solution. It is a TERRIBLE long term solution.”

The teenage brain is often not developed enough for comprehensive long term planning. Teens need parental guidance and support to realize that their decisions do have long term consequences. Once teens see that avoiding challenges makes things worse in the long run, you can then help them build a set of teenage stress management strategies. (High on that list will be breathing for relaxation.)

Once your teen understands that avoiding the piano recital is a bad long term solution, you can then ideate with them! There are loads of teenage stress management tactics they can use to engage with the recital. Maybe they don’t have to perform for the whole recital. Or, if they don’t perform at all, they can at least go and listen to everybody else. See if they can talk to their teacher and get access to the space beforehand to see how it feels. As long as they’re not avoiding the source of their anxiety and are willing to teenager stress management, there are so many options!

“Stinks” and “Handle”<...