School is a source of stress for many children and parents. It is doubly difficult for teenagers: an increase in the study load, preparation for exams coincides with the period of hormonal changes in the body. Psychotherapist Melanie Greenberg talks about what causes stress in teens and how to deal with it.
Teenagers experience stress more often than adults. Their lives are rapidly changing: transition to high school (or to another school), choice of profession, admission to a university. These changes often cause anxiety and self-doubt. You need to make independent decisions and manage your time, and with this, too, there are numerous difficulties.
Sources and signs of teenage stress
The main sources of stress for a teenager are school days and the issue of entering a good university. High school students are forced to spend long hours studying and going to tutors. This is the only way to successfully pass the exams, get a good certificate and enter the budget department of the university. As a result, about half of first-year students admit to experiencing long-term stress associated with their studies.
How do you know if your teen or you yourself are stressed? Here are a few tell-tale signs of stress: constant anxiety, panic attacks, insomnia, physical manifestations (stomach cramps or headache), social isolation, withdrawal, fatigue, overwork, and bad mood. Did you or your child mark several items from the list? This is a reason to think seriously.
How to deal with stress?
Stress per se is not always bad: it gives us energy and motivation to work and achieve goals. But too much stress is bad for your physical and mental health. It is stress that pushes some teenagers to use drugs and alcohol: it helps them to disconnect from problems, to “forget”, to extinguish negative emotions. Therefore, it is especially important for you as a parent to know strategies that will help your child cope with stress.
1. Change your attitude to the situation
Teach your teenager to look at the situation from different angles. What happens if he doesn’t get an A or gets into a prestigious university? Will the world end? Not at all. Invite him to use his imagination and imagine the worst case scenario. A teenager will not enter a top university? It’s not scary, other, less popular universities produce excellent specialists. And grades in a quarter or a year (and even in a certificate) will be forgotten as soon as the child becomes a student.
By the way, such a strategy does not mean at all that you need to sit back: having imagined the most negative scenarios, you can think about how to avoid them.
2. Take a trip through time
Help your teen draw a picture of a happy future, when the source of stress will not affect him, and all current worries will be left behind. By imagining the future, we put the source of stress in perspective and realize that it is only part of life, but not all of life.
3. Accept and name your negative emotions
Teenagers, like adults, often try to simply get rid of the feeling of stress. However, studies show that avoidance does not have a long-term effect. Stress will find an opportunity to seep back into your life and destroy it.
It is much more effective to accept emotions and feelings (anxiety, anger, sadness) and stop blaming yourself for experiencing them. The problem is often not in the emotions themselves, and they are only intensified due to our negative attitude and fear of the future.
Teenagers, as a rule, do not yet know how to manage emotions. They rejoice violently and experience a minor setback as a tragedy. By naming emotions out loud, writing thoughts in a diary, speaking out feelings, they will learn to distance themselves from them and better control them.
And, of course, trusting relationships with parents will help teenagers better cope with stress and school workloads.