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.


Sponsored by Equip: Eating disorder treatment
that works—delivered at home. Visit equip.health/talking for more
information, and a free consultation.

Full show notesImagine 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...