Growing Up

Every teenager knows that sometimes life can be challenging. Bad feelings happen - loneliness, worry, sadness, anger, shame. Bad things happen – parents fighting or divorcing, friends or family getting ill or dying, bullying, abuse, trauma, break-ups, pandemics, rejections or betrayal. Language can’t always do justice to how bad things can feel.

And to add to all the bad feelings and the bad events, we have our minds telling us all sorts of other bad stuff. I hate myself… I’ll never live that down…No-one else feels like this…I’m fat…Noone cares…Our minds are like massive thought-factories with huge production lines, churning out thought-after-thought-afterthought. Some of these thoughts are painful and self-critical, and these tend to be the ones we get hooked on. It can feel like if we could just cut these thoughts out of our brains, we’d be OK.

It’s partly that other people set us up to fail. When we feel sad, they say ‘Cheer up’. When we feel worried, they tell us ‘Don’t worry about it’. When we feel angry, they say ‘Calm down’. It’s like having any emotions other than happiness is seen as a bad thing.

Our brains, which are so good at keeping us alive, haven’t actually moved on much since the Stone Age. At the smallest hint of danger, the guard dog in our brain is snapping away and telling us we need to fight or run!

But really, the main ‘danger’ of the 21st Century is being alone. Research shows that the biggest threat to our physical and mental health is isolation – it’s why lockdown was so hard for so many people. We want to be part of the tribe. So when our brains

feed us thoughts about not being clever/pretty/thin/ fun/hard-working/popular [insert your own adjective] enough, no wonder we panic – we’re terrified of being cast out by the tribe and left to survive alone.

It can feel like a full-time job trying not to think all the thoughts. Distraction can help for a bit, as can other positive coping mechanisms like good sleep, exercise and talking to others. But the thoughts and feelings tend to keep coming back. Have you noticed that the more you try not to have the thoughts and feelings, the more you tend to have them?

Here’s the thing. You can’t control your thoughts and feelings. They just happen.

But you can control how you act – you can choose to react or you can choose to respond. Reacting tends to be quick, it usually happens without us planning it, and it is often only a temporary solution. You might lash out in an argument and you feel better for a bit: you’ve released a bit of rage. Or you might procrastinate in getting on with work (don’t worry, we all do it – this article is already 10 days late) and you might enjoy the delay; you can do fun stuff instead.

But in the longer term, reacting is not often helpful. Negative coping mechanisms such as self-harm or restrictive eating might work in the moment (for different reasons), but they cause long-term harm and difficulty. That lashing out in an argument causes hurt and upset. That procrastination gets you in trouble with a teacher. continued →

Accepting what you can’t change, and committing to what you can. by C Nicholas School Counsellor Personal Evolution