If Someone You Love Is Having a Hard Time, Listen to This

Mel Robbins (00:32:03):

Sure.

Dr. Lisa Damour (00:32:04):

Anytime we're looking at gender findings, we're looking at huge numbers. There's tremendous overlap between the genders. And then of course, we've only really studied conventional genders. We've only really studied male female. We are slow to the table to study kids who do not fit into one of the traditional categories. So everything I'm saying needs to sort of be couched in that broader understanding of how we do the research and what we've studied. So having said that, when we look at traditional gender categories, a pretty consistent broad is that when they're in distress, girls are more likely to discuss and boys are more likely to distract. And these are both actually acceptable forms of managing emotions. There's actually nothing wrong with either, but where we see trouble is if you veer to the extreme or you use that strategy all the time, ideal. Can you

Mel Robbins (00:33:04):

Give us an example of what you mean by discuss or distract? So we kind of have a knowing and then also what's sort of within range of helpful coping? Absolutely. And what gets to be on the fringe?

Dr. Lisa Damour (00:33:18):

Absolutely. So let's say a girl, someone's mean to her at school and she goes and finds her best friend and she's like, ah, you're not going to believe what so-and-so just did. She was so such a jerk to me. And her friend says, oh man, she is such a jerk and I love you and you're fine and you're cool. Okay, yay, good outcome. We like that. We could also have a boy where someone's a jerk to him at school and he's upset by it and he doesn't want to talk about it, but he goes home and he plays basketball for a little while, blows off steam, gets it out of a system, gets past, it lets it go moves on. Those are two perfectly reasonable outcomes of those two different strategies. What we don't want to see is, and I'll just stay with the boy girl, great stereotypes we don't want to see is girls who then they discuss it with their friend and then they end up in a three hour conversation discussing it with their friend, and then they are doing the critical analysis of the text thread with the girl who was mean.

(00:34:24):

And then four other girls hop in on this. And there's two problems with this. One is, and this is sort of a secondary finding, girls are more likely than boys to engage in vicarious distress. Meaning if my friend's upset now I'm upset too.

Mel Robbins (00:34:38):

So

Dr. Lisa Damour (00:34:38):

It has this widening swath of distress. The other thing is that it threatens to turn into what psychologists call rumination, which is basically a spinning of one's emotional wheels. And though it's kind of gross, it's really helpful metaphor. It's like picking at an emotional wound. The more you talk about it, the worse it gets. It's not healing up better to just leave it alone. So we don't want to see that extreme. And if we go down the boy stereotype, what we don't want to see is that every time this kid has something that feels bad, he just shuts down, goes plays basketball or hops on his video game and just stays in this distracted place until the feeling dies down enough that he can tolerate it. Because the cost to him is number one, he's not getting the kind of social support he deserves. Nobody knows he's in pain.

(00:35:28):

Number two, he's not actually developing the fluency in verbalizing emotions that we'd like to see. The part of what happens if we go down these boy girl pads is that girls get better and better and better at talking about feelings. They practice it all the time. And boys can get worse and worse and worse at talking about feelings because they're not practicing it with one another especially. And so the ideal management is somewhere in between, a little disgusting, a little distracting, or any variety of other strategies that help to tame or express emotions. We just don't want to see anybody leaning too hard on one strategy.

Mel Robbins (00:36:07):

These were super relatable examples, and again, because I know that what our listeners crave is, okay, so what do I do? Because these are so relatable and I know so many people in our family and also friends whose we're going to start with the kind of rumination side, and I'm sure this goes for adults too. You have those people in your life that can't let it go. They're still talking about the divorce and it's been final for three years. They're still complaining about what happened when mom died and who got what, and just holding on to it. How do you approach that with somebody?

(00:37:50):

Just the space alone, the time alone brings it down to size and they're no longer dumping stress hormones into their bloodstream for that 24 hours. They're not thinking about it. So it helps people to find their feet. So that's a short term, something that just popped up. I think there's probably a different answer for those bigger questions around people who are struggling to let go of a painful divorce or struggling to let go of how things went down in the family in the wake of a parent's death. And my hunch is for that, there's just a lot of meaning to what occurred that has not really been examined or

Mel Robbins (00:38:29):

Resolved. Yeah. What about with the boys? How do you approach that or any behavior of just distraction and literally losing yourself in something so you don't have to face the pain of the situation and the emotions that you're feeling.

Dr. Lisa Damour (00:38:50):

So it's interesting. Distraction can end up as costly coping. We can go right back to that category, which is so say a boy's had a really rough day and his strategy is to play video games for eight hours. Okay, well, he may have gotten past the rough day, but now he has a new problem. He hasn't done his homework and he needs to go to bed. I mean, it creates its own side effects. So one way to take it up is just from that side of saying, look, I get it that you may have had a rough day and playing some video games helps you get through it. You can't be doing this so much that you now have a new situation to deal with.

(00:39:24):

Is there another way you could help yourself feel better? Now, the thing here about boys and expression, right? That's really what's underneath us is getting kids, but of boys in particular to talk about feelings is that there's a lot caught up in why they don't talk about feelings. And I would say it's one of the hardest things in parenting that I hear about is parents of adolescent boys in particular who become very, very sphinx and very, very reserved. And I think that's its own fascinating and complex universe sense. We'll have you

Mel Robbins (00:40:04):

Back to talk about that to make sense. I think that's its whole 45 minute conversation, don't

Dr. Lisa Damour (00:40:09):

You? It's a big one. It's a big one and it's an important one and it can be done, but I'll just for now, I'll just say expression of emotion takes a lot of forms and it's not always in language. And what I've really become much better at is honoring that there are healthy ways that the boys express emotion. But it's not always in words though. I also wish they were more often talking about what they were feeling,

Mel Robbins (00:40:35):

Speaking of expressing themselves. One of the things that I learned in this book that was just life-changing, I wish I had known this 10 years ago. It's a word that explained my entire experience of raising teenage daughters, which is externalization.

Dr. Lisa Damour (00:42:03):

In teenagers. It's actually one of the very few things that is especially organized around adolescence is the use of the, we call it the defense of externalization. And Mel, I have a story. I have such a vivid memory of being a freshman in college myself, and I grew up in Colorado and I went to college in Connecticut. And I remember doing this to my mom. I remember getting her on the phone. Yeah, you did too. And I remember calling her and being like, I don't know. I don't really like it here. I don't really have any friends. I'm not sure I'm going to make it. I don't know. Then I see my roommate, I'm like, I got to go. So I hang up the phone, I go out with my roommate, I have a super good time, and I remember my mom called me the next day and she's like, are you okay?

(00:42:46):

And I'm like, yeah, I don't know what your problem is, but I'm fine. My dad told me later, she'd been up all night. I mean, she was getting ready to pack the cooler and drive across the planes to retrieve me. So this is not a new maneuver. Teenagers have forever and always done this. It's not a fun maneuver for parents for sure, but it is also really hard to be a teenager and they have a lot of big powerful emotions. And I think sometimes the way they get through their day is to conveniently dump them, treat them like emotional trash. I think of on the people who love them and are willing to collect their trash and having discarded the trash. What we often find as parents is the kids don't want to talk about it. They're like, no, no, no. I've done the trash. Don't ask me about it. I'm not going to answer your texts. I'm not going to pick up your phone calls, just take the trash and make it go away.

Mel Robbins (00:43:39):

That's unbelievable. You're exactly right. Because on the receiving end of it, I feel like they've dumped the trash on me. I'm weighted down. I'm worried about it, I'm thinking about it. I just had a sleepless night the other night because of something that one of our daughters is going through. And then I spoke to her in the morning. She's like, oh, what? That's fine. And it was, if nothing happened, I'm like, excuse me, I should have taped the conversation. So you heard the Defcon 10 bomb that you dropped on me, and I should probably apologize Lisa to my mom because I would call her,

Dr. Lisa Damour (00:44:10):

I know

Mel Robbins (00:44:11):

Every day from the payphone in my dorm hallway at Dartmouth collect to cry and complain. I don't like it here. I don't know anybody here. Everybody always has their friends here. And it got so bad after two weeks of this that my mom said, you either hang up the fucking phone and don't call me again and get out there and make some friends, or I'm coming to pick you up the next time you call me and you'll come back home and you'll go to the community college and that'll be that I never called her again. But then our daughters both that same scenario, the first couple of weeks of school just processing the hard emotion. But it's so liberating to hear that it's normal. And so should we just let the trash fly and kind of step out of the way and not feel like we have to collect it? Just let them litter.

Dr. Lisa Damour (00:45:04):

Yes. And I think that if you're worried in this interaction, you can say to your kid, do you want my help or do you just need to vent?

(00:45:13):

And that is often if they say, I just need to vent, which is overwhelmingly what they are looking for, what I would say is visualize yourself opening an emotional garbage bag and just let them unload all of that garbage into the bag. And then when the call is over, dispose of it, right? Don't carry it around. Don't take it to bed with you. Just be like, that was a garbage collection moment and the kid needed a place to dump the garbage. And I am as the loving person in their life, willing to collect their garbage. But you don't need to then go through the trash yourself.

Mel Robbins (00:45:49):

You could have saved me years in marriage counseling because I feel like a lot of the times what my husband and I then are at odds about is my stress about what the kids have just externalized by handing me their emotional garbage and his ability to just either not be bothered by it, not worried about it, knowing that the wave is going. Thank you, thank you. Thank you for writing about that. One final question about this kind of category and then I want to jump into the incredible insights that you have about how the last three years and lockdown in particular impacted teenagers and young adults specifically and what you've seen in your work. And so when do you know it's time to get a therapist involved and how do you look for one, the right one?

(00:47:09):

And so I think if you feel like we've given this as much thought as we can, we've thought of everything we can, what we're doing isn't working. Our kid is not better enough, our kid is still suffering, that's when it's a great time to get help. And I think that's really critically important. I think one thing when we talk about teenagers and therapy, one thing that I always like to remember is something that I remember when I was taught this in my training that teenagers worry that there's something wrong with them. Almost universally, this is a worry that teenagers carry, and it's because being a teenager is a very dysregulating and very disorganizing experience. Their emotions become very intense. The way their brain works changes. And so I think it's true that a lot of teenagers harbor a secret concern that there's something wrong with them.

(00:47:59):

And so when it comes time to suggest that they should be in therapy, we have to do it carefully because I think if you just say, you know what, you need to talk to a pro, then the kid's like, oh my gosh, this is exactly my secret concern is now confirmed. So I always am very careful about how I approach it, even when I know it's the right recommendation. And I will tend to say to teenagers, listen for what you are up against. You deserve way more support than you have, and we need to get someone who actually knows what they're doing to help support you through this.

(00:48:30):

That is just a tiny shift that can make an enormous difference. Then there's the issue of finding somebody, and this is hard, and part of what's hard about it is there's just not a lot of clinicians who specialize in caring for teenagers. And one thing that really never got discussed in the broad conversation about the adolescent mental health crisis, there were two reasons for that crisis. One, what teenagers went through that really increased their suffering at a very fast pace. And the other, everyone who cares for teenagers was already full in their practice before March, 2020. And so we're not really in a position to scale up the workforce, the people who care for teenagers very quickly. It takes a long time actually to become trained at it. And so that was really where things ended up in a bad place is that the need accelerated and the workforce to address the need cannot be scaled up at that pace. So finding a clinician is hard. It was hard before 2020, March, 2020, it's hard. Now it's getting a little better. What I would say is in my experience, pediatricians are actually a really good resource. They know your kid, they know the local talent in terms of psychotherapy. They are often good at actually doing a good match between your kid and who they know in the community. They can sometimes help facilitate making an appointment happen. And so that's usually my generic advice is ask your pediatrician who they like.

Mel Robbins (00:50:01):

I think that is so hopeful and so accessible, and I really appreciate that answer because it's something anybody can do and it makes a lot of sense. Let's pivot to this accelerating mental health crisis that we are reading about.

Dr. Lisa Damour (00:51:21):

Well, let's look at it this way. Teenagers have two jobs. Their jobs are to become increasingly independent and to spend as much time with their friends as possible. And those jobs were made impossible by what they went through. And I'll tell you, Mel, I saw a wide range of responses, a few kids, but this isn't a sign that this was a good thing. We're glad to be home, we're anxious about school. Very, very small minority of kids felt some relief under lockdown, but we now have the reality that they do need to return to the world at large. And that's harder than it was before. Most kids just suffered through it, found their way one way or another, while feeling miserable. I mean, they were miserable and miserable in all of its variety, some incredibly anxious about what was happening with their social lives. Some unable to do school in 2D.

(00:52:30):

That is its own fascinating universe of kids who were otherwise very strong students. And I saw several of these really, as long as they were in a bricks and mortar school, could do school, and as soon as it was collapsed into a 2D space, we're actually incapable. And it got me thinking, you can hear I get excited about the phenomenology of this. It got me thinking about, oh, we never knew that so much of what kids kept some kids organized at school was moving physically from room to room. So, oh, I must be in this class now because I'm sitting next to the kid I sit next to in this class. I'm going to focus on this class. Or that they knew that it was time to get out their notebook because everyone around them was getting out their notebook or they knew that it was time to start writing down notes, noticing people doing it.

(00:53:17):

I just became completely fascinated by all of these ancillary supports that we had never thought about because we had never been put in a position to think about. And I watch kids who really were incredibly strong academically crater. I mean absolutely be completely unable to do school. There were also kids who could do school. They just hated it and they did it and they hated it. So we saw all of that. And then at the other far limit, and unfortunately we saw way too many kids in this area, I saw kids entirely derailed who developed horrifying eating disorders, who were smoking so much weed that it really probably changed their developmental trajectory at least for a while, who ended up in just rip roaring social conflicts that I think were partly to deal with boredom and partly out of desperation and partly out of who knows what. I will tell you, Mel, and from having read my work, I am generally on the lake. Kids are resilient. It's all good. We'll find our way through this. And I still believe that. But I can tell you having been a practicing clinician for a long time before 2020 march and then post the stories I hear now of kids derailing are just much, much more extreme than what I used to hear. And that part is alarming to me, and I don't get alarmed very easily.

Mel Robbins (00:54:48):

Wow, what do we need to know? Because what we saw, which is very interesting, is we saw a lot of grief because our daughters were in the middle of their college experience. And so there was daily ricocheting emotion about policies changing. Are we going back? Are we not going back? Who's going back? Am I going to live off all of that stuff? And then all of those sort of milestones of graduation or prom or all of these things that people look forward to or just expected being ripped away. And so I saw a lot of that. And I also have lots of friends whose kids just opted out of school, who started smoking pot, who became incredibly rebellious, who became super depressed eating disorders. And so I think we've all, if it's not happened in our family, we have somebody close to us who is going through it. And what do you want us, first of all, to know about how not being able to do the two things you're supposed to do, which is become more independent and spend more time with your friends, how does that impact a child developmentally?

Dr. Lisa Damour (00:56:18):

I think the best language for this is to think in terms of delay, not loss, though there's a lot of loss and what your daughters, they lost elements of college that they're never getting back. And I think that needs to be acknowledged is exactly what it is. But in terms of developing a sense of independence, finding one's path and one's interests, developing one's peer relationships and increasing reliance on peer relationships and moving out into the peer world, we just have to accept that there's a delay in that. And there's no getting around the fact that there's a delay. I really do think that development isn't the most powerful force in the world, and kids will find their way back onto a trajectory that works for them. I really do know that humans as a group bend towards health, but sometimes I think it's hard for us to accept that there are delays.

(00:57:13):

I have sometimes found myself in conversations where people are hand wringing about how kids look academically, which we are still seeing the aftermath academically. And I say to them, okay, but wouldn't it be so weird if kids didn't go to school for a year and a half and they came back and we saw no impact from that? That's true. We would've been thinking, what have we been doing all this time requiring them to show up for school? So we just have to say they're going to be delayed because they missed out. And that language I think is better than a lost language. I also think we got to look for the big stuff. So we talked about suicidality. Let's just hit it head on. It's the scariest thing. So it is true now that thoughts of suicide are actually not rare, that I don't have the statistics at my fingertips, but

(00:58:12):

And it's not rare. And I remember being a teenager, and one time my mom and I were in a fight and I was like, oh, wouldn't she? If I hurt myself right now, she'd feel so bad, right? So did I think about it? Yes. Was I myself close to doing it? No. Right. So I do want people to know that if you have a worry about a teenager or anybody in your life around questions of whether they are suicidal, what we recommend as psychologists is you just have to ask. You have to ask. And here's how I would have you do it. I would say to the person, listen, I need to ask you a question. And this may feel out of the blue, something like that. But because, and then you tell them why, right? You don't just ask randomly. You say, because you've been in your room for a day and a half, or you have not seemed like yourself, or you were so upset about that thing.

(00:59:04):

I need to ask, have you had any thoughts of harming yourself or ending your life? And the reason we're reluctant to do this is we're afraid we're going to give the person the idea That's a concern. We know that it's not a concern. What we do know when we have researched adolescence is if a teenager is thinking about suicide, they're glad you asked. So I think we start with the scariest thing and how to address the scariest thing. And then we can go think down the line of more manageable concerns. But that is the one we just have to address very directly.

Mel Robbins (00:59:38):

Thank you. And it was very reassuring to hear the research that teenagers are just glad you asked.

Dr. Lisa Damour (00:59:44):

They're glad you asked.

Mel Robbins (00:59:45):

Yeah. We did a episode with our 18-year-old son now where he disclosed to me on the episode, I did not know that this was the case, that he had had big scary thoughts like that freshman year, and I had no idea. And so one of the things that was interesting about it is he was pretty surprised to learn that it is frequent and normal to have a thought like that. And there's a big difference between having a thought and actually wanting it to happen, and that they do come and go, and they do go away. And it doesn't mean you're at the end of the end, but even just talking about it made 'em feel better. And so I love that you just gave us permission based on the research to just ask. They will feel better even if the thought didn't even cross over mind. Thank you for checking in. I would love for you to help us understand some of the issues that you've seen coming out of this and how to really parse, especially in the wake of the rising crisis that you're seeing, even if it's just starting to come to the surface, it's sort of even delayed that now we're kind of through it and quote back to school and back to this, that there's still this delay and there's still this hangover, so to speak,

(01:01:07):

Of the emotional experience. And I'm convinced everybody's nervous system is in fight or flight still.

Mel Robbins (01:02:02):

Oh

Dr. Lisa Damour (01:02:03):

Yeah. That kind of got lost in a lot of the reporting. And I think that's actually a really critically important point because when I think about the fall of 2021, what we were looking at were kids who were either entering their third school year that was disrupted.

(01:02:16):

They were all entering their third school year. Either they were back in masks and terrified or not going back in masks and terrified or still hybrid and unhappy. So it was a very particular time. So just to say we kind of don't know and we won't know for about another 18 months where we stand now, anecdotally, and this is important to say for kids who are back to their regular routines, they look to me like kids did before 2020 that I'm seeing a lot of just typical adolescents, which is also rich and spicy on a good day. But it's typical, right? But the things I worry about, I worry about increased isolation. People spend more time away from one another.

(01:03:12):

It's a big topic and I feel like it's way more complicated than just all good or all bad. I worry about the norms in digital environments where kids hang out. And what I mean by that is that one thing I feel that we definitely saw between March, 2020 and then the subsequent years was that kids who were stuck at home, who felt like they were going to use that time to get in shape and improve themselves. So they start searching online for fitness, diet, exercise, anything like that. The algorithms that drive social media pick this up and start to flood their feed with image after image after image of ultra thin or ultra fit. And then how to lose weight. And here's an advertisement for it.

(01:04:02):

Teenagers are vulnerable to norms. They are more vulnerable to norms than kids are. They are more vulnerable to norms than adults are. And it's hard, we can't prove this with the data, but I will just go out on a limb and say, I am convinced if you are looking at 4,000 images a day of ultrafit, ultra thin people, that impacts real world behavior and that changes how you eat and that changes how you exercise. And we did see an explosion of eating disorders. So what I would say is we got to watch where kids are online now and forever because the norms are powerful.

Mel Robbins (01:04:42):

I can't agree more. In fact, it happened to our daughter. I remember when she got into treatment for disordered eating, she ended up deleting her visco and her Instagram. And I don't even think TikTok was really a thing. This was back in high school, so it hadn't quite exploded yet. And she said, my entire feed is basically models and waste trainers and puppies, and it makes me feel terrible. And I keep looking at these images and it makes me feel like I need to get like that. And I know that these are fake. I know there are filters, but I still can't help it. I want to be like that. And so it drove all of this obsessive behavior. Is there also a connection with the spike in eating disorders because it is typically something driven by this need to

Dr. Lisa Damour (01:05:41):

Control? It's interesting. I wrote a piece for the Times, I think it came out in April, 2021 about the spike in eating disorders. And there's a variety of reasons that can come into it. So some is everything fills out of control. Here's one thing I can't control that can be really powerful. Another that one of the experts I interviewed referenced that I thought was really important is that we had a lot of very hard driving teenagers with a whole lot of energy who suddenly couldn't do the things they usually did, who would've poured their growth, self-improvement juice into band and sports and all these other things, and who had just a whole bunch of that lying around. And so then they turned it against themselves into I'm just going to get really fit. I might as well do something to make myself better in this time. But I do also just think if all you're looking at are ultra thin ultrafit bodies and you are not going to school and looking at normal bodies in 3D, your sense of what bodies looks like changes and your view of your own body changes.

Mel Robbins (01:06:52):

I want to ask you a very specific question on this topic because I think there's also this kind of cultural obsession with being in shape and being healthy and being good looking. And if you've got a kid that suddenly goes on a health kick and now they're exercising and they get positive reinforcement because they're looking great and they're not going to run the 5K and now they're going to get in triathlons or now everyone's like, oh, you look great in that bathing suit.

Dr. Lisa Damour (01:08:10):

It's tricky and it is easy to miss. So some framing stuff. One is teenagers shouldn't be losing weight and usually they're gaining weight in the course of typical development and later puberty that they're gaining weight and they're gaining strength. So if you notice that your teenager has lost weight, you should be attentive to that. It's just an unusual thing for teenagers to do. And it's not all bad. I mean, you can talk with your pediatrician and there are some teenagers who the pediatrician may say, this weight is not an healthy place. Losing some weight would be a healthier thing to do. Then you can do that with the nutritionist and the pediatrician and do it in a controlled and careful way. But one thing I've learned from my colleagues in the eating disorder world is by the time a teenager's losing weight, something's usually up. And I think that's just a valuable marker to have. The other thing that we want to watch out for is dropping entire food categories. So I'll put it this way. Not everybody who becomes a vegetarian goes on to develop an eating disorder. Everybody who goes on to developing an eating disorder drops a food category.

Mel Robbins (01:09:29):

Oh my God. I literally just had this conversation with somebody about how it's become, and you said teenagers are so 11 to 25, very impacted by norms. And our daughter, the one who did have disordered eating, did a research paper in college about, I don't even remember the name of it, but that there's a lot of people in her age group that are gluten-free or vegan or dairy-free or this, and it is a socially acceptable and praised way to have disordered eating. It's not actually an allergy. It's literally it's crossed a line. Is that what you're talking about?

Dr. Lisa Damour (01:10:21):

It is a flag. It's a flag. And one of the ways I sometimes assess that flag is I'll sometimes care for teenagers who are like, I don't eat sugar. And I'll be like, Hmm, right. And my eyebrows will go up. But if I also know that they don't eat sugar, unless somebody brings in some really good cupcakes, I don't worry about it too much. So there's what people say and what people do. And what we want fundamentally is to see that food is a pleasure, that it is a wonderful source of energy, that there's variety in a young person's diet and any of our diets. So those are the flag. Those are some flags to keep an eye out for. And then I would say if concerns really start to rise, we can actually go back to where we started around people having two sides.

(01:11:09):

And it's the job of all of us and teenagers are developing in their capacity to take good care of ourselves. That's our job. And so if a teenager is suddenly eating nothing but celery and running a lot, that kid is not taking good care of themselves. And so before it gets to that extreme, I would want the loving person in their life to say, Hey, I see that you're getting pretty fit, but I'm not so sure you're taking good care of yourself. Are you taking good care of yourself? Are you eating the kind of variety of nutrition? Are you being gentle enough on your body like exercise? Yeah, but not to the point of injury to use that as a guardrail that fundamentally that's the goal is for the teenager to be doing a really, really excellent job of caring for themselves.

Mel Robbins (01:11:57):

Beautiful. Just a couple more questions. One that I had is I worry a lot about anxiety and I worry about how we seem to have a parenting crisis of parents who can't tolerate their kid's anxiety and are allowing their kids anxiety to run the house. Can you give us some advice, especially given that teenagers are such emotional beings to begin with, how do you give space for the normal emotion without letting a teenager's emotion run your house or dictate what they do?

Dr. Lisa Damour (01:12:46):

Well, thank you for bringing up this. I mean, it's a huge topic, and actually between untangled and the emotional lives of the teenagers, I published a book called Under Pressure Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls. But what I hear all the time is 80% applies to kids of all genders, which I am sure is true. And in that book, I actually make at the outset a case for healthy anxiety and a case for healthy stress. And we have always, as psychologists recognize that healthy anxiety is the anxiety that alerts us when something's wrong. It is not on its own pathological, and we have not helped the situation by using the same word to describe healthy anxiety and something that we diagnose, it's sort of better set. We have the word sadness and we have depression for the diagnosis, but we use anxiety in both categories. So that doesn't help us as much. And same with stress. Stress is actually the human experience of adaptation. We experience stress anytime things change, anytime we have to adapt to a new condition, and it can be a wonderful condition or a lousy condition, but we always experience stress under change conditions, and we only consider stress pathological if it is chronic or traumatic. But all other stress, we just talk into the helping you grow doesn't always feel good category.

(01:14:03):

What I will tell you is that the most important thing for people to know about anxiety is that feeds anxiety. And this is one of the, again, most critical findings in psychology, and one that we have done a completely terrible job of getting out to the public. And here's how it works. If I, let's say, have some social avoidance, some social anxiety, and there's a party that I've been invited to and it's a good party to go to, it's a rational, should be fun friend of mine's party. But say, I feel anxious and say, I agree to go to the party, but the day of my anxiety is starting to really accelerate, and then I'm thinking, I don't think I should go. I don't want to go and say, my parent is like, ah, it's just a party. You don't have to go. Here's what happens.

(01:14:51):

The first thing that happens is, I feel so much better. My anxiety was cresting and then I get to avoid, and it immediately plummets. It's like what we call reinforcement instantly relief. And so the upshot of that is, the next time I feel anxious, I know what helps me feel better. It's avoidance. So that's the first problem. The second problem is that I never go to the party and check out how it's right. So whatever I have daydreamed about how terrifying this party is or how cruel everyone will be at the party that is now sealed in Amber, and I continue to believe it, I have no counter evidence. Whereas if I go to the party, I'm like, oh, wait, it's not so bad. But if I don't go, so it actually entrenches anxiety to avoid the things we fear. Now, if a kid is avoiding school, which a lot of kids are right now, there's a third issue, which is the minute you don't show up at school, you are out of the loop socially, and you are out of the loop academically.

(01:15:51):

So it's that much harder to get back in. So there's not a lot in psychology where there is agreement across the entire field where there is zero controversy. But on this one, everyone's in agreement that avoidance feeds anxiety and everyone is in agreement that exposure is the answer. And what I mean by that is you have to get in. You don't have to go to every party all the time, but you have to baby step your way in. You have to go check out the party. You cannot have the reinforcement avoidance. You cannot have the daydream become the reality. And so if this is your kid and they're like, I can't go to school, I can't go to the party, I can't fill in the blank. You say, alright, here's the deal.

Mel Robbins (01:16:57):

It's devastating, right? I think about the fact that I was homesick at every camp, so much so that I would just escalate it until the counselors got so tired, then my parents would show up because it works. It goes back to your original thing. We do these things because they work, they work. And when we allow our kid to keep transferring from one school to another because they can't handle it, we are locking in anxiety as a coping mechanism and avoidance as a coping mechanism. Wow. You are so good. I want to ask you one final question, which is if you had to bottom line it to make it really simple, because clearly it's very complicated to have teenagers in your life, they're amazing and they're also incredibly challenging emotional beings going through a lot of change.

Dr. Lisa Damour (01:18:16):

I can say it in two words, but Mel, this is to be filed under easy to save, very hard to do. Our job is to try to be a steady presence. What does that mean? That means that when teenagers are having their big feelings and their feelings are big, and they come our way with their big feelings, that we don't meet them where they are, we don't get as agitated as they are, oh, that we can listen, be attentive and offer empathy, which a huge percentage of the time is all they want. And there's two reasons why this is critically important. One is that when teenagers are bringing us their concerns, they're watching our reaction. And if they're having a really bad 15-year-old day and then they bring it to us and then we hit the ceiling, they can't help but think, oh my gosh, I thought this was like 15-year-old size pad.

(01:19:21):

It turns out it's 52-year-old size pad, so that is not reassuring to them. And then the other thing is when we offer empathy as the response, so we're there, we're there and we're empathic with whatever their distress is. I think that is actually the all times steady presence move because what you're doing is you're highly present, you are empathizing, you are saying, that stinks. I am sorry. I wish that had not happened. So you are there for it, but you're incredibly steady. You are not picking up the phone, you are not canceling plans. You are not yourself becoming highly agitated. And so deep empathy and just listening goes so much further than we sometimes give a credit for. And even if there's more to be done, starting with is never a bad move and a huge percentage of the time gives teenagers everything that they want and need.

Mel Robbins (01:20:16):

Wow. I love your phrase. It stinks, right? If there are big emotions, that's all you need to say. That stinks. That if you, I never really thought about it from the standpoint that if I get distressed, I magnify their distress, and if I embody, I think I'm going to use the power of objectivity and use you as my avatar, and the next time Kendall FaceTimes me because she graduates from college a week from Thursday, and so I'm just sort of waiting for the roller coaster and I am going to embody you. I'm going to just be a steady presence, and I'm going to realize that the emotions that she's going to feel from the grief to the excitement to the fear, to the sadness, I just have to hold space for it. I don't need to project, oh, no. What if it triggers the eating disorder? What if this happens? What if, Hey, cheer up, calm down. It's going to be okay. I don't have to do any of that. I just have to say it stinks. Wow, because that's normal and it's actually a sign that she's mentally well, oh my

Dr. Lisa Damour (01:21:31):

Gosh, exactly. The evidence of her perfect functioning.

Mel Robbins (01:21:34):

And the same is true the adults in your life that if the big feelings and the distress is related to a corresponding event that makes sense, they're mentally well. That is a revelation. A revelation, everybody. You have got to pick up this book, the Emotional Lives of Teenagers. I cannot tell you how helpful, hopeful, encouraging, empowering it is. You've done it again, you've dragged me through motherhood with Mother Load, and you now taught us so much. When it comes to, when you kind of tease out the advice, Lisa, it always is kind of like a giant duh, not your advice necessarily. Clearly, since all of it, I'm like, holy shit, but I find your work so helpful because it is always grounded in a larger framing, and so the advice that sounds simple is suddenly so profound because you understand it in the context of the larger framing.

Dr. Lisa Damour (01:22:37):

Thank you. I am so glad I can be helpful.

Mel Robbins (01:22:41):

My

Dr. Lisa Damour (01:22:41):

Gosh, it's a hard time to be a person, and it's a hard time to be raising teenagers.

Mel Robbins (01:22:45):

It sure is. Any final words of hope or that you want people to know?

Dr. Lisa Damour (01:22:56):

Here's what I want people to know. We have studied adolescent mental health for decades, and the single most powerful force for protecting teenage mental health is strong relationships with caring adults. We're not going to medicate or therapize our way out of this adolescent mental health crisis. It's going to be about the adults around teenagers, parents, caregivers, parents, caregivers, bosses, mentors, coaches, teachers being there for teenagers, and being invested in their emotional lives. That's how we're going to find our way through this.

Mel Robbins (01:23:34):

Well, thank you for giving us the tools to be able to show up and do just that. It's an honor

Dr. Lisa Damour (01:23:38):

To be here.

Mel Robbins (01:23:41):

I got so much out of that conversation. Holy smokes. I wish she lived closer to me. You wish she lived closer to you. I would love to have her on speed dial or as my walking buddy, but now we've got her on the Mel Robbins podcast and you've got me, and I've got you, and I'm so happy we're doing this thing called Life Together in case nobody else tells you today, I wanted to be sure to remind you that I love you. I believe in you, and I believe in your ability to feel all those big emotions, to ride the wave and to be a steady presence for the people in your life and for yourself, because as we just learned, that's exactly what everybody needs from us. Alrighty, I'll talk to you in a few days. I love you. Oh, one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Hey, it's Mel. Thank you so much for being here. If you enjoyed that video, bye. God, please subscribe because I don't want you to miss a thing. Thank you so much for being here. We've got so much amazing stuff coming. Thank you so much for sending this stuff to your friends and your family. I love you. We create these videos for you, so make sure you subscribe.