The hidden cost of talking about it too much | Lisa Damour: Full Interview

I'm Dr. Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist, author, and co-host of Ask Lisa: The Psychology of Raising Tweens and Teens. Today on Big Think, we'll cover a few different topics: why stress is actually a good thing, why uncomfortable emotions should not be chased away, and what it means to be a growing person — that especially vivid time of life that is adolescence, both having one and having been one.

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How to Cope with Stress

Stress is a big topic these days, and for good reason. As a culture and as a generation, we're dealing with some pretty stressful things. Digital technology infuses every aspect of our lives, meaning we're constantly exposed to a stream of information that can be upsetting. We also live in an age of what I call "optimization"—the sense that every minute should be put to the best possible use to make us the best possible people. That's stressful too.

Stress is your hype squad

The way we should think about stress is as our personal hype squad. Stress shows up when we face a challenge, something new, or something different, and it arrives to get us ready—to marshal our energy and focus our attention. Stress is fundamentally helpful. It lets us rise to challenges.

One problem right now is that stress has been given a bad name. People think you're not supposed to experience it—that somewhere out there is a zen state you're supposed to reach and live in permanently. That's not how this works. Stress is part of life and will always come up when changes occur.

Because of this misunderstanding, people react unhelpfully: they become stressed about being stressed. The hype squad shows up and they ask, "Why is the hype squad here?" When we're stressed about being stressed, we're more likely to avoid stress and become unduly uncomfortable in its presence, rather than harnessing it to perform and manage our lives the way we want to.

We need to be careful with this wrong idea that stress is somehow bad, because it leads to asking, "How can I reduce or eliminate stress from my life?" The only way to do that is to narrow your life tremendously—to stop taking on new experiences and stop doing hard things. Nobody wants that; we don't grow, and life becomes uninteresting. We need to accept that reasonable levels of stress are part of life, that any change brings stress, and that stress is not only not bad—it's actually a sign that we are growing. Embraced that way, there's much to be gained from it.

So stress is good and growth-giving within reasonable limits, absolutely to be expected, and we should welcome it as a sign that we're doing new and interesting things.

But not all the time

We can't be stressed all the time. You don't want the hype squad around constantly—that becomes exhausting, tedious, and wearing. If we're stressed all the time, we become impatient, brittle, and tired. We also don't sleep well: we're tired from the day's stress, then sleep poorly at night, only compounding the problem. So while we should accept and welcome stress as a normal part of life, we also need it to happen within limits, with chances to rest and recover.

When psychologists get concerned is with chronic stress—stress without the opportunity to recover, where the hype squad never goes away. Under chronic stress, real wear and tear appears in both the brain and the body. The brain becomes hypersensitized and overreactive to even minor changes in the environment, and the body contends with an ongoing stream of cortisol and other stress hormones that elevate blood pressure, interfere with sleep, and start to break down essential bodily functions. As helpful as stress can be for rising to an occasion, we don't want those hormones and bodily changes happening all the time.

When stress becomes trauma

At its extreme, stress becomes trauma. People use that word a lot and in different ways, but psychologists define trauma as any experience that overwhelms your ability to cope with it. What's traumatic to you might not be traumatic to me—it depends on the context, the experience, and our life histories. But trauma is something we want to avoid at all costs; there's no benefit to becoming psychologically or physiologically overwhelmed.

Research shows that when people are traumatized—especially repeatedly—it rewires the nervous system. They stay on high alert all the time: a door shuts loudly and they react as though it were a gunshot.

Trauma is enormously hard on the nervous system—hard on the person experiencing it and potentially on the people around them. Luckily, we're great at treating trauma if the reaction lasts over time, but trauma is something to be avoided at all costs.

One way I love to think about psychological stress is that it's a lot like physical stress—namely, strength training. Anytime you want to build muscle in the gym, you pick up literally stressful weights. You know full well that if you pick up easy weights, you're just wasting your time. You have to pick up weights that are actually uncomfortable in order to grow.

Psychological stress is the exact same way. When we go through emotionally or mentally taxing experiences, it does not feel good, in the same way that strength training done right does not feel good. But that is how we grow. If we're comfortable all the time, nothing is changing and we are not expanding our capacities as humans. Recognizing that discomfort—the strain of change—is how we develop ourselves is not only accurate; it actually makes us less stressed when we feel stressed.

Stress mindset changes performance

Some of the coolest research out there has found that understanding the benefits of stress can improve your performance. Studies show that if you teach people that stress is natural and helpful—that it helps you grow and perform—then when they're put in challenging situations, they feel less stressed and perform better. In contrast, people who believe stress is bad for them get into a challenging situation, become stressed, then become stressed about being stressed, and their performance degrades while their stress goes up.

Embracing that sensation of "Wow, this is a lot. I'm up against something hard and new and difficult" is actually part of what helps us meet the experience and bring our full capacities to it.

What doesn't kill us makes us stronger

There's also a line of research that falls into what I'd call social science proving common sense: what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. That probably overstates it, but it's not all wrong. Many of us know from personal experience that going through really hard things is unpleasant at the time but makes us better able to manage new difficulties when they come up. Research shows that people who have gone through hard things and found their way through actually build capacity and feel more resilient in the face of new difficulties.

So anytime we're going through something hard, as long as we have the resources and support we need around us, we can recognize that there will be a payoff. We don't necessarily enjoy difficult periods of our life, but if we find our way through, the research shows we tend to feel more capable, less frightened, and more able when new difficulties inevitably arise.

A clinician's perspective

One of the things I really like about being a clinical psychologist is helping people through very difficult times of their life. That means I'm often up against incredibly painful experiences—the death of a loved one, the loss of a child. Terrible, terrible things. These are emotionally taxing for me as I try to help somebody through them. But the net effect is that it has changed my overall stress levels. Being up against very challenging situations and helping people work through them has made me much more relaxed about the day-to-day things I deal with. I will often say to my own kids: I know what constitutes a crisis. This is not a crisis.

The double experience of hard effort

The mindset we adopt under stressful conditions changes everything. Back to the gym: think of somebody lifting really heavy weights, doing lots of reps, coming to the end of their workout because their muscles are so tired. They're feeling two things. First, they're really uncomfortable because this is hard. The other is a sense of achievement—of having gotten themselves to the place where growth and change happen. There can be pride in that moment, even while thinking "I'm going to be pretty sore tomorrow."

If we take that mindset to other types of stress—really hard intellectual work, taking on a project at work way bigger than anything you've done before—we can have that same double experience: "This is a lot, this is uncomfortable, this is hard," and on top of that, "I am going to be so much more capable once I get myself through this. I am gaining as I go. This will be hard, I will be tired, and once I've recovered, I'm going to have more capacity than I've ever had before."

Mindset changes the body's response

Recognizing that stress is a natural and even helpful reaction not only changes our mindset—it actually changes how our body reacts to stressful circumstances. We know that people with a "stress is healthy and good for you" view are less physiologically reactive to stressful circumstances: their heart rate doesn't go up as high as someone who is frightened of stress, and they have a better, more moderated stress hormone response compared to...

People who see stress as natural, healthy, and growth-giving are less physiologically reactive: their heart rate doesn't rise as high, and their stress hormone response is more moderated than those who fear or try to avoid stress. Accepting stress this way helps us meet it more effectively and lets our bodies react in a more effective way.

The longer I have worked on, thought about, and lived with stress, the more my attention has shifted from stress itself to the question of recovery. Stress is a done deal—we should accept and even embrace it. What really matters is how we recover afterward. Think again of the gym: anyone serious about strength training works out hard and then protects time for recovery, because that's what enables growth over time. So my main interest is not whether people have hard times or painful feelings—they definitely do—but what they do next.

Healthy versus unhealthy coping

There's a great divide. Some people use healthy coping, which brings relief and does no harm. Others use unhealthy coping, which brings relief—we always find relief somehow—but comes with a cost attached.

Unhealthy coping falls into four categories:

1. Turning to substances for relief. The problem is that they work: getting high or drunk does make you feel better, but it's a short-term solution that almost always sets up long-term problems, especially if it becomes a habit.
2. Taking it out on oneself—talking badly about yourself, being unkind, beating yourself up. It gives a sense of control, of "I'm doing something about this," but again it's a short-term fix with long-term costs.
3. Taking it out on other people. You have a bad day at the office and come home and everyone gets punished for it one way or another. There's some relief in it, but needless to say it damages relationships.
4. Using avoidance to manage anxiety. Anxiety is uncomfortable and, like stress, part of life, and our instinct is to avoid it. But avoiding what makes you anxious makes it more scary, because whatever you imagine remains true in your mind. If you're anxious about something you should be able to do, take steps toward it—even very small ones. Moving toward what we fear is always better than defaulting to avoidance.

The key about unhealthy coping is that it is coping. Humans don't work against their own interests; we're trying to feel better. So if you notice you—or someone you love—are using unhealthy coping, start from the understanding that it's serving a purpose, and figure out what that purpose is. Do you need a better way to relax? Are you trying not to think about something? Are you too scared of something and don't know what to do? Once you recognize you're trying to solve a problem, you can ask what better solution would bring relief without the huge price tag.

Healthy coping is personal

The list of unhealthy coping is basically those four things, but the list of healthy coping is as long as you want it to be. The only thing that matters is that what you're doing brings relief and does no harm. It's incredibly personal: I like to cook, and I love to exercise, especially taking walks with friends. What works for you is what works for you—all that matters is that there are no downsides for you or anyone else.

When "healthy" coping isn't working

That said, there are a couple of things that look like healthy coping but don't work as well as we think. One is multitasking: "I'll cope by getting all these things done at once." It can seem like it's working, but it actually stresses us out. The way to think about multitasking is as self-interruption. You know how annoying it is when someone interrupts you and knocks you off your train of thought? We only really have one train of thought, so when we multitask we're constantly interrupting ourselves, doing to ourselves the very frustration we resent from others. If you want to slow down and recover, do one thing at a time—you'll do it better and feel better doing it.

The other pattern I see all the time, especially in hardworking, driven people, is guilt during recovery. They finally let themselves recover after a period of stress, turning to healthy coping like enjoying a TV show or spending time with friends, but they feel guilty while doing it—a nagging sense that they could be getting something else done. This is not helpful. Guilt-soaked recovery isn't really recovery. Back to the gym: someone serious about strength training doesn't feel bad about the days they let their muscles recover, because they know that's a key part of building capacity and growth. Same goes for you. You have worked hard and earned your rest—take it and savor it. I actually think savoring our favorite ways of coping is exactly what gets us up and ready to go back and keep growing.

Research shows that if you feel leisure is a waste of time, you enjoy it less, and that attitude is associated with higher rates of depression and anxiety. On the other hand, if you welcome leisure—if you accept that recovery is not only something you should have, but something you get to have, that you have every right to have—that's associated with feeling better overall.

When we're going through something difficult, we can start to turn inward and beat ourselves up, and this tends not to help us feel better. One thing I've noticed over years of clinical practice is that for some people this happens almost automatically: as soon as something goes wrong, they think, "Oh, what's the matter with me?" In retrospect, I've wasted a lot of people's time trying to get them to stop doing that—it's very hard to stop. So what I say to people now is: okay, that's your first reaction. It's out of the gate before you even realize it's going to happen. Let's treat it as your first reaction, and then sit here for a minute and think—might there be a second reaction? Is there another way you could see this?

If my client is still struggling at that point, I ask: what would you say to a friend in this exact same position? Invariably, people are so much kinder and more compassionate, and can come up with great guidance for this theoretical friend—and then usually they can turn that around and use it for themselves.

What matters most: relationships

One of the wonderful things about being 30 years into practicing as a psychologist is that my sense of what matters has gotten clearer and clearer. To me, it's relationships. So much research, and so much common sense, tells us that the quality of your life will be measured in the quality of your relationships. Especially when we're stressed, but even when we're not, taking time to prioritize, protect, seek out, and cultivate those relationships is really what this is all about.

Exercise and sleep

The other thing I've learned about keeping stress at healthy levels is that two things we know are important really do matter. The first is exercise. Exercise is probably the best drug on the market when it comes to managing stress. We tend to feel better while we're doing it, it can be an important form of leisure, and it's a time when our minds can run, solve problems, or clean up mental clutter. Often, if we exercise without listening to a podcast or watching a TV show, we come to the end of it feeling more clear-headed in addition to having gotten our workout.

Exercise is also tied to the other thing that really matters: sleep. Sleep is the glue that holds human beings together. If you're not getting the sleep you need, you're going to be stressed and feel pretty uncomfortable. When we exercise, we sleep better—we fall asleep faster and sleep more soundly. We should be getting all the sleep our bodies need no matter what, but if you're having any trouble with it, exercise will help make it happen.

Three rules for being smart about stress

Here's what I can promise you: our lives are better when we're smart about stress. And being smart about stress comes down to three things.

1. Don't be afraid of it. It's part of life. We're supposed to have it; it helps us grow. So long as it's within normal limits, it's good for us.
2. Protect recovery. Stress without recovery is a problem. Stress plus adequate recovery equals growth.
3. Enjoy your recovery. When you're coping in healthy ways and have an opportunity for leisure, don't ruin it with guilt. Lean into it and enjoy it all the way. You've earned it, you deserve it, and savoring it will help you get back in there and do even more.

When stress crosses the line

As much as I'm the PR team for distress and all the value it brings to our lives, there are lines we don't want to cross. If the definition of being mentally healthy is having feelings that fit what's happening and managing them well, then it's time to worry when we're struggling to manage feelings well. For example, in depression, people feel low, blank, or irritable and can't get their hands around it; in anxiety disorders, they have a fear response that doesn't fit what's happening and that they cannot get under control.

We can lean into and value uncomfortable emotions so long as we know they're healthy — and part of knowing they're healthy is knowing what's over the line: struggling to manage feelings well, or turning to unhealthy coping to get them under control.

There's a long-standing debate in psychology about where emotions fit into our lives. Are they in charge, or are we? The fact is, some people are ruled by their emotions, with emotions calling all the shots — and that's not how we want our lives to be. The best framing I've heard comes from my colleague Dr. Terry Tobias, a psychologist who uses a great metaphor: we all have a personal board of directors, and on it sit our priorities, interests, values, logistical considerations, and our emotions. Emotions are informational — they tell us how things are going and offer guidance about what's working and what's not. But as she puts it, emotions have a seat on the board, yet they're not the chair of the board, and they very rarely get a deciding vote.

Emotions are like the most ancient part of being human. They've always been there to guide us: anxiety keeps us safe, and our ancestors who weren't anxious did not survive to pass their genes into the population. So emotions are old and powerful, and they tend to arise in the older, lower parts of the brain — the amygdala being the major player. First the emotion arises there, then the newer part of the brain, behind the forehead, interprets it and decides what to make of it. We can then act or not act depending on what the higher-order part of the brain has decided that emotion means.

Mental health isn't about feeling good

One of the biggest challenges we face as a culture is that we've landed on an inaccurate understanding of mental health. You'll often hear that you're mentally healthy if you feel good. I'm all for feeling good — I'm a psychologist, I want people to feel good — but that has nothing to do with what makes for mental health. The definition I like, from my field, is that being mentally healthy is about two things: first, having feelings that fit what's actually happening, even if they're unwanted emotions; and second — where the rubber really hits the road — managing those feelings well.

Not only is it untrue that mental health is about feeling good; sometimes mental health is about feeling bad. Say you get fired from a job you really cared about. If you feel nothing, that's weird. You should be upset, worried about what's next, concerned about missing your old colleagues. Feeling nothing or feeling okay under those conditions would actually be grounds for concern.

People have the idea that ideally we should feel good, but that's not how life works. Emotions cut across a very wide range, from very pleasant to very unpleasant, and I like to think of all of them as information — a feedback system telling us how our life is going. If we do something and hate it, we should pay attention. If we feel terrible around someone, we should pay attention. If something is terrific, we should be curious about that too. They are there as data.

Another way to think about unwanted emotions is the way we think about physical pain. Nobody likes pain, but we recognize it's important: if your hand is on a hot burner, pain gets you to pull it away; if you have a painful knee injury, it tells you to stop running. Pain tells us to notice something's not right and take steps to fix it. Emotional discomfort does the exact same job — it helps us notice when something isn't working and, ideally, to improve things. This matters especially now, when we've decided we're supposed to feel good, calm, and at ease as much as possible, which isn't really possible.

We've also ended up with the idea that being emotional somehow means you're fragile. But that's not true: you can be very emotional, feel things incredibly deeply, and still be completely sturdy and function beautifully in the world. In fact, being attuned to what's happening with other people and with yourself is a superpower — it helps us make great decisions and treat people well. There's no benefit to being indifferent or invulnerable to what's going on around or inside us.

Feelings aren't optional

Feelings aren't optional — you don't get to decide whether you have them. Everybody does. So the question becomes what we do with them. You can treat them as information: what's it telling me, and how do I use it to make my life better? Or you can try to get rid of them, especially the uncomfortable ones. But getting rid of uncomfortable emotions is a workout requiring constant effort — they don't just go away. You're putting energy into keeping them at bay, which is a real drain on your system. You're not getting the benefit of all that information, and you're also shouldering the door that keeps those feelings out. Eventually they find a way out, or you become exhausted and overwhelmed by them.

The more we can turn toward and get to know even the emotions we're not happy to have, the smarter we'll be about ourselves and our lives — and frankly, the more energy we'll have for whatever is in front of us.

Metaphors for holding emotions

There's a phrase from the mindfulness world I love: think of your mind as a pond full of fish, where the fish are feelings, and the goal is to be the pond. It's another way of not pushing emotions away, but holding them at a little distance rather than feeling they're running the show. If you need another metaphor, emotions can be in the passenger seat of our lives: we have our hands on the wheel, deciding where the car goes and how fast, while emotions give us information about where we might want to go and how quickly to get there. It's not great when emotions are the ones with their hands on the wheel.

to be more parts of ourselves, more information from our lives weighing in when we're choosing our direction. Having set aside the idea that we're not supposed to have uncomfortable emotions, we can move to a much more helpful idea: emotions are going to show up, even ones we don't really want, and we have to figure out what to do with them and how to handle that well.

Once we're into the territory of handling emotions well, we're into a field psychologists call emotion regulation. It's a boring term for a really important and exciting idea: we don't banish emotions, we manage them. And managing emotions works across two categories. Sometimes we manage emotions by expressing them — the teenagers I care for talk about "getting feelings out." Sometimes we manage them by quieting them, taming them, bringing them back down to size.

The crucial point is that both categories are equally valuable. Psychologists are good with both. Sometimes it's good to express emotions; sometimes it's good to tame them. You don't want to do all one or all the other — you want to work across both.

Naming feelings makes them weaker

This is the part of my job that's kind of magic. We don't really understand why it works this way, but we have enough science to tell us that when we come up with a label for a feeling, we feel that feeling less intensely. If I'm sad and I tell you I feel sad, I actually feel less sad. If I'm anxious and I say I'm feeling anxious, my anxiety goes down.

We have some theories about why. Once you put an uncomfortable emotion into words, it goes from being abstract — and emotions are highly abstract — to something concrete, and concrete is easier to work with. Putting words around our feelings also means we can share them: we can tell other people what's going on inside of us, we don't have to carry it alone, and we may even get some really great support.

The more precise the labeling, the better. There's a line of research on emotional granularity. It's better to say "I'm so disappointed," if that's what you're feeling, than just "I'm sad." Or "I'm so frustrated," instead of "I don't know, I'm kind of angry, I guess." Not only is labeling emotions powerful — the more granular the labeling, the more bang we get for that verbal buck.

Why sharing dispels shame

There's something else to be said about talking about our feelings, if that's something you want to do. We know as psychologists that things are often much worse on the inside than on the outside: when it's banging around in our own head, it seems worse than when it's out on the table in front of us. I think what's often at work there is the emotion of shame — enormously powerful, but not talked about much. When we hold emotions inside and feel we can't talk about them, there's usually a sense that this reflects badly on me, that there's something wrong with me for having this emotion.

If we can get to a place of talking about it, sharing it, and putting it in the light, what we usually see is that whoever we're sharing it with says, "I get it. Of course you feel that way." And now the shame is dispelled. We're reminded that emotions are part of being human, even some pretty unpleasant ones. So if we can talk about and share what we feel, we not only get social support — which really matters when dealing with hard things — we also get something that helps sweep away shame.

Healthy and unhealthy expression

Starting with the category of expressing emotions: there are better and worse ways to do it. Healthy expression can take many forms. It usually starts with talking — saying "I feel this," or "this just happened to me," or "I need to process this and tell somebody what's on my mind." Being able to talk about our feelings is enormously valuable, both for understanding them ourselves and for making meaningful connections with other people.

But healthy expression isn't just about talking. Art that moves us is healthy expression: artists and creatives channel their emotions into something productive. Music and the graphical arts are expressive phenomena — ways of getting emotions out into the world while making something. You also see healthy emotional expression in sports: if you've had a really rough day and you go take it out on the tennis court, that's a great way to express that discomfort.

There are also unhealthy forms. If you have a bad day at work, come home, and kick the dog, you're expressing that emotion in a terrible way. Same with yelling or being unkind to people. These are ways of taking our feelings out that give us relief but leave damage in our wake.

Taming emotions

The idea that expressing and taming are equally important surprises people, especially coming from psychologists. You'd think we'd want you to talk about feelings endlessly until you feel better, but it doesn't always work that way. In fact, one of the most valuable things in our repertoire as human beings is the ability to make feelings quiet down — to calm them, to get them to go more quiet when we want to. That's what we call taming.

There are fabulous strategies for taming emotions we don't want to have. One is distraction. Say you had to have a medical test and you're awaiting results that could be really good or really bad, you don't know, and there's nothing you can do. Thinking and thinking about it, talking and talking about it, won't actually help. Watching a really good movie or losing yourself in a book is what you need. In these moments, distraction can be your best friend and a great strategy for taming discomfort.

Another form of taming is problem solving. If the thing making you upset is something you can fix, you don't need to spend time worrying or talking about it—just get going on the fixing. That will help you feel better. Taming can also take the form of comforts, something we do so naturally as humans: taking a nice long shower, eating a food you love, getting a hug. These are all forms of emotional taming.

I really want people to know that psychologists do not put talking forward as the one end-all, be-all of emotion management. Talking is one strategy, in the category of expression, and there are other things in that category. Taming is a whole other category, and it is full of wonderful options. What you choose will be unique to you—it will be what you like—but it is no less valuable than talking about emotions or finding other ways to express them.

So, I'm a psychologist, and we're all for talking about feelings—to a point. What we know is that talking about feelings should bring relief: the more you talk, the better you feel. From time to time, it doesn't work that way. Instead, the more we talk, the worse we feel—and so we keep talking and keep feeling worse. Our technical term for this is rumination, but the best way to think about it is getting stuck in an emotional rut. Or, frankly, it's kind of gross but a really helpful metaphor: picking at an emotional wound. You won't leave it alone, so it won't heal up—you're making it worse.

If you notice that you, or someone you care about, is ruminating—going round and round on something, where the more they think and talk about it, the deeper they dig themselves in—the solution is actually to stop expressing, to not keep going down that road.

The best way to make rumination stop is distraction: find something totally engrossing and put your mind on it. I think of it as a forced change of one's mental channel. I have a dear friend who had a very taxing job, and she would call

A dear friend of mine had a very taxing job, and she would call me at the end of the day saying, "Oh my gosh, I had such a day. There is no way I'm going to be able to get to sleep tonight unless I watch something really dumb and really absorbing on TV." She had it right. Thinking about our problems is great if it's helping us, but we can take it to a point that actually makes things worse.

As a psychologist, empathy is really important—I know that, you know that. And as a psychologist who cares for adolescents and the adults around them, I'm always telling the parents and caregivers of teenagers: be empathic, offer empathy.

But I'm going to throw a little asterisk on this. We have research showing—and I'm not surprised by this, and you won't be either—that empathy is actually taxing to the person who's being empathic. It's a workout of its own to be the empathic person. This is why therapy is great: you're actually paying somebody for their time and their empathy. That is the arrangement.

It also means we want to be mindful of how much we ask of other people, or of any given individual. If day over day over day we are seeking empathy from the same person, they may love us a lot, they may want to do it, they may have every investment in our well-being—but we need to bear in mind that it's hard, and hard for them. We want to make sure we're not asking more than is fair. Most of the time we're not; most of the time people are happy to do it.

And if you've ever felt that way while empathizing—"I want to be here for this person, but I'm also finding it hard"—well, science has your back. Being empathic is actually not a costless activity.

Here's the bottom line. You're going to feel everything, and you don't necessarily have a say about what you're going to feel or when you're going to feel it. Many of those feelings are going to be uncomfortable and unwanted. If you commit yourself to avoiding them, trying not to feel them, your life is going to get really narrow, and you're going to lose touch with yourself and other people.

If instead you welcome the idea that emotions are here to stay—that they're here to let us know how things are going, to give us information—a whole lot of good things are going to happen even while you're contending with uncomfortable emotions. You're going to learn more about yourself. You're going to become more emotionally durable with time as you get used to managing uncomfortable emotions. You will be more empathic to other people as they go through hard things.

And frankly, you're going to make better choices. Most of the time when we're making bad choices, it's because we're ignoring the uncomfortable emotions we're having because of those bad choices.

choices or that are trying to warn us away from those bad choices. Treating uncomfortable emotions as friends and allies is how this works, and doing so will make your life better.

I've been a clinical psychologist for more than 30 years, and most of that time has focused on caring for teenagers and the people around them. My research looks at what gets in the way of kids thriving and what adults can do to help. What I've learned is that much of what is true for young people is also true for people of all ages.

Adolescence is a transformational decade

Adolescence is an extraordinary time of life, and when it begins and ends is up for debate. I tend to think of roughly ages 10 to 20 as the main window, and it is transformational. Put a 10-year-old next to a 20-year-old and you're talking about two different creatures. By contrast, I'm 55, and me at 45 wasn't that different from who I am now. A lot goes down in that decade. It's when young people figure out what they value in themselves and the kind of value they want to contribute to the world. It can set people up for rich, thriving adulthoods, or it can be a time when people lose their way for a while. The beautiful thing about teenagers is that they get back on track pretty quickly — though sometimes someone goes off course in adolescence and spends a long time on a road they didn't want to be on.

Teenagers are creative copers

One of my favorite things is to talk with teenagers about how they cope after a rough day, and they're often better at it than adults — by which I mean more creative. I ask: "You've had a horrible day. Picture going home with two hours to help yourself feel better. What are you most likely to do?"

The number one response, both in conversation and in a Gallup poll I conducted with them, is listening to music. Almost all teenagers have curated playlists of mood-matching music, often with great names — a "gr" playlist or a "sad and peaceful" playlist. They listen to music that matches the negative mood they're having. You'd think that would make them feel worse, but teenagers know, and the science shows, that it actually helps. An angry teenager who plays the gr playlist feels the emotion more intensely, then moves through it more quickly and feels better faster. The same goes for sadness. It's a precise, portable, autonomous, and quick solution for dealing with uncomfortable emotions, and many of them use it.

They also turn to playing with friends when upset. Boys especially turn to video games, and this is often far more social than we give them credit for: they're having a good time, possibly distracting themselves from something they can't fix, enjoying their friends' company, and trading playful banter.

The creativity is real. One teenage girl told me that after a really rough day she takes a piece of paper, rips it into pieces, and tapes it back together like a puzzle. I thought: fantastic. Does no harm, brings relief, it's her thing, and it works for her.

So as much as we worry about how teenagers handle their emotions, adults should also step back and admire them. The kid who comes home, has a good cry — crying is actually a very adaptive way to manage emotions: it brings relief and does no harm — and then cuddles the dog on the floor for a while is actually the picture of mental health.

Music can express and tame feelings

Music is a particularly interesting category in how people, especially teenagers, manage emotions, because it can both express and tame them. A sad teenager playing her sad-and-peaceful playlist is using it as a proxy form of expression — it's cathartic and helps get the feeling out. What's also common is that teenagers keep a happy playlist — one kid called it his "yayya" playlist — and after a period of getting the feeling out, they switch over to the mood playlist that lifts them.

Teenagers use these "mood lifting" playlists to counter unwanted moods, and they do this in sophisticated ways—some go straight for the happy playlist. The point is that teenagers have figured out how to use music to shift their mood in all sorts of ways, and quickly.

When we think about where teenagers stand today, we have to hold two realities at once. On one hand, today's teenagers have been through a lot: a global pandemic, concerns about gun violence, concerns about the climate and where it's headed, and achievement pressures we never saw as teenagers—and they are working hard to manage all of this. As a result, we are seeing higher rates of anxiety and depression in teens than in the past, and we need to pay attention to that.

At the same time, most teenagers are thriving, and we need to pay attention to that too. In fact, we are raising the best-behaved generation of teenagers on record. They are doing fewer drugs than previous generations, they wear their seat belts and helmets, they are delaying sexual intimacy, and they are having fewer partners. They are achieving more and behaving better than we ever did as adolescents. And side by side with that, there are a lot of kids who are suffering and deserve extra support.

Knowing this, I used a Gallup poll of mine to tell a fuller story. I asked teenagers, "What did you feel a lot of yesterday?" and gave them a whole range of emotions to consider. 45% said they felt a lot of stress, 38% said they felt really anxious, and 23% said they felt sad. On top of that, 94% said they also felt happy the previous day. Those numbers add up to way more than 100—kids are feeling lots of different emotions, often on the very same day.

So it matters that kids are telling us they're anxious and sad. But it also matters that we don't take an overall negative view of adolescence and miss the fact that 94% of them also felt happy yesterday.

Gender differences and asking the right questions

We do see some differences in how teenagers are faring by gender. But before getting into them, let me say this: every time we look at gender differences, we find that people of different genders are more alike than they are different. Part of why is that we're always talking about overlapping bell curves—the means can be pretty close together and still show a difference. For something like anxiety, girls may be more anxious than boys on average, but there are a lot of boys who are more anxious than the average girl, and a lot of girls who are less anxious than the average boy. So take these gender findings with a grain of salt.

That said, here's what we see. As psychologists know, when girls are distressed, they have been socialized to collapse in on themselves—they're more likely to become anxious or depressed. Boys, on the other hand, have been socialized to act out when in distress—they're more likely to get themselves in trouble or be hard on other people. So when surveys only ask about sadness and depression, girls look like they're struggling much more than boys. When we expand the surveys to ask about anger or irritability, a lot more boys report those feelings.

The most important thing adults can do is recognize that an upset kid isn't being naughty or being a bad kid—he's a kid in distress, showing that distress in the ways our culture gives boys permission to be distressed.

This matters especially with teenagers: we need to make sure we're asking the right questions. If we ask whether teenagers are suffering and only measure anxiety and depression, we'll find out more about what's happening for girls, because we're not asking the questions that pick up distress in boys.

We may run into a similar problem with loneliness. It may well be that boys are more lonely than girls, but we might not be asking the right question. If we ask, "How much do you talk to your friends? How much do you share with your friends?" we'll get a lot of information suggesting girls are better at this and thus less lonely. But for a lot of boys, companionship isn't about talking or sharing—it's about doing things together: being on a team, playing a game, sharing a hobby. So when talking about distress or loneliness, we need to be careful not to ask questions that tip the information one way or another and miss what's really happening.

First, I am 100% sure that if I had had these technologies when I was a teenager, I would be using them exactly as our teenagers do. I know this because I remember how excited I got about call waiting. So the first thing we should do as adults is recognize that if we had had access to these phones and technologies, we probably would have used them just as our kids do—and in fact, many of us already are using our phones the way our kids do. We should set aside that negative stereotype and recognize how easily we negatively stereotype teens.

Teenagers need us to help them navigate all of this, because it is tremendously complex. They are being confronted by technologies that are wildly sophisticated, hold a lot of information about those teenagers, and put in front of them things that are totally irresistible. We are much better equipped to help young people manage this if we take a stance not of "you and your phone," but "hey kid, you and me—let's look at these technologies, where they're coming from, what they're about, and make sure that if you're using them, you're doing so in a way that is good for you."

Because phones are new and are absolutely a big piece of what's happening with teenagers, it can be easy to focus on them as the main, if not sole, cause of the rising rates of psychological distress we're seeing in teenagers. We should pay attention to digital technology and what it means for young people's health and thriving, but we don't want it to dominate the whole picture.

When I think about youth mental health, I tend to think in terms of a pie chart. The research shows social media and digital technology is definitely a slice of that pie, but there's a lot else in it. Another big slice is how much sleep teens are getting: today's teens sleep way less than previous generations, and sleep and mental health are best friends. Sleep and social media are connected, of course, especially if kids are up at night on their phones. But there are other things in the pie chart as well: poverty and discrimination, worries about gun violence, achievement pressures, concerns about the climate, and—kids tell us—a lot of worry about things like political polarization. There's also family mental health, childhood trauma, and peer concerns like bullying and worries about friendship. All of that makes up the pie, and as the adults around teenagers, we want to pay attention to the big picture rather than get stuck on one slice.

I love teenagers, and what I love about them is that they are vivid. Everything going on with them is intense and big—even if to adults it doesn't seem like that big a deal, everything's a big deal to them. What's hard about being a teenager is that there is so much change in a very short period of time, and change equals stress. All that change is stressful for the young person and for the people around them.

I think the fact that having a teenager is stressful has, over many generations, led to a lot of negative stereotyping about teenagers—and interestingly, the stereotype keeps changing. Think back to American Graffiti in the 1950s: they're so naughty, they're up to no good. Then there's The Who's "Baba O'Riley," with "teenage wasteland" as its main theme—the idea of teenagers as burnouts in some way. Today, our negative stereotype about teenagers is that they're fragile, or maybe even damaged, because they've been through a lot. But we need to be mindful that we often cast a negative lens around adolescence, and maybe some of that has to do with how we think about our own teenage years, especially if they weren't that great an experience.

Teenagers can often look at adults in a way that's pretty askance. They can judge us, they can be skeptical, and they're the first to catch our hypocrisies. And as much as I love them, I'll be the first to say, teenagers can be stressful to raise.

One of the best parts of my job is that I get to ask teenagers, "How can adults really be most helpful to you?" What they tell me over and over again, both in my clinical practice and through surveys I conduct, is that more than anything, they just want us to listen. When they've had a hard day or they're upset about something, they just want to be able to share it and have us take it in.

Why does this work? Most of the time, when we've gone through something hard, if we can just tell somebody, then we can lay it down and move on—and that's true for teenagers too. It's also true that teenagers feel everything really intensely, and they sometimes worry, "Is something wrong with me that I'm so upset about this?" So if our kid can come home and say, "Oh my gosh, listen to what happened at school today," and they tell us and we say, "Oh yeah, that stinks," two things are happening at once. First, they're getting empathy—they get to lay it down and move on. They're also getting our reassurance: you're having a reaction that makes sense, there's nothing wrong with you, you're good to go.

Just listening is far more powerful than adults often recognize. Because we assume it isn't enough, we often leap in with advice—and if you've done this with a teenager, you know it usually doesn't go well. They give you their problem, and instead of saying, "Oh man, that stinks," you say, "Well, did you try?" Invariably the kid responds, "You don't get it. You don't understand." Very rarely is the kid like, "I'm awfully glad you made that suggestion; I hadn't thought of that myself."

What the survey data shows

From talking with kids in my practice, being a mom myself, and conducting surveys asking teenagers, "What do you want adults to do when you're upset?" the results were:

• 62% said, "I just want you to listen."
• 56% said, "I just want some space."
• Only 28% said they wanted advice.

Let's come back to that space response. What I usually hear from adults is: "My kid came home, they were clearly upset, and they went into their room. How do I get them to open up?" The parent or caregiver in that moment feels like something has gone wrong. But if we recognize that kids asking for space are dealing with upset feelings, we can appreciate that the kid is saying, "I want to try to fix this for myself. I want to see if I can get myself feeling better all by myself." And this is exactly what we want: for our kids to develop autonomy and capacity around dealing with uncomfortable emotions.

So often, if they've had a hard day at school, they've held it together all day, and getting to their room—if they have a room to themselves—is finally the time and place where they can carry on with their own healthy, autonomous coping and do the things that actually get them ready to thrive on their own.

From jelly beans to Brussels sprouts

One of the hardest things about raising teenagers is what feels like an overnight shift in how our kids regard us. The metaphor I like is that when they're younger, we're like jelly beans—they want as much of us as they can have. Then as they move into adolescence, which begins around age 10 or 11, we become a bit more like Brussels sprouts: they know we're good for them, but they don't want an endless supply.

In your home, this looks like a 9-, 10-, or 11-year-old who, when upset, wants a hug—your warmth and comfort. Then, in the Brussels sprout phase, they come home knowing your advice may be good but not really wanting it; they want to figure out how to manage things themselves. I know this from raising kids, caring for kids, and from my survey data: when I ask kids what they want their parent to do to help them feel better, younger tweens were twice as likely as older teens to say they wanted a hug.

Expressing and taming

Say your teenager had a terrible day and comes home talking about it. Think in terms of expressing and taming. If they're talking, they're already on the right path—talking about what's upsetting them is how most people get themselves feeling better. Your job is to listen. If listening isn't enough, offer empathy: "Of course you're upset—anyone in your shoes would be." You can validate what they're feeling. Most of the time, teenagers feel better if we just listen, empathize, and validate.

If your kid is still upset, you switch gears and move toward taming, so that they don't end up ruminating.

When your teenager is still upset, you might say, "What would help you feel better?" — or my favorite line in all of parenting: "Is there anything I can do that won't make this worse?" Being present and available, but not leaping in to solve the problem, is almost always what teenagers are really looking for.

Seven transitions

When I was working on my book Untangled, I had to figure out how to organize everything teenagers go through, so I came up with seven transitions that turn kids into adults — they're the chapter titles:

1. Parting with childhood
2. Joining a new pack
3. Harnessing emotions
4. Contending with adult authority
5. Planning for the future
6. Entering the romantic world
7. Caring for themselves

My editor kept asking whether these happen in an order or all at once, and I kept saying, "Yes, yes." They do roughly map onto development: parting with childhood around fifth or sixth grade, joining a new pack in sixth or seventh, harnessing emotions in seventh or eighth, contending with adult authority in eighth or ninth, planning for the future in ninth or tenth. Entering the romantic world can show up anywhere — even in grad school. Learning to care for oneself is what we want kids to master before they leave home.

It helps to look at what seems like the chaos of adolescence and realize teenagers are working their way through all these jobs. That's a lot of work, which means a lot of stress. Our job as the loving adults around them is to not take any of it personally and to help them on their way.

None of this is personal

My work caring for teenagers extends to caring for the adults raising them, because it isn't easy. We adore our kids, we know new risks are on the horizon once they become adolescents, and we no longer have the closeness we enjoyed when they were younger. That's a scary combination: more things they can get into trouble with, more that can go wrong, and they don't want our guidance like they used to.

The thing I want adults to know is that none of this is personal. Things derail most often when the adult takes it personally that the kid doesn't want help the same way. Teenagers have a really hard job: they have to become independent while living with us — getting ready to leave home at the exact moment we still know what they last ate and what socks they're wearing. So they accomplish psychological distance in advance of physical distance. The more we can stand back and admire that as a brilliant, elegant solution — rather than feeling they've broken up with us — the more we stay available for when they do want to connect. What I hear from teenagers all the time is that they care deeply about the adults in their lives and want guidance and connection; the adjustment for us is that they usually want it on their terms and their timing.

Teenagers change fast

A colleague who also works with teenagers told me, "We get way too much credit for our work with teenagers. They get better so much faster than people of any other age." It's true: within the vividness of adolescence is tremendous plasticity, a tremendous capacity to change routes. I've cared for teenagers who were cutting school and clashing with friends and family, then suddenly attached themselves to a goal — like deciding to move to New York — and realized that path involved going to school and getting along with everyone. Within three months, I was looking at a totally different kid.

So even when teenagers seem to be struggling, or are really off-putting, they are amenable to change.

Speak to the side you want to show up

If you want that change to happen, recognize that all teenagers have two sides: the side that might cut class, be impulsive, or be snarky, and a side that is broad-minded, philosophical, and forward-looking. More than anything, teenagers want to be taken seriously. Even if they're showing you the annoying, impulsive side, speak to the second side: "Hey, this isn't like you," or "I know you want to have a lot of options at the end of high school." What I've learned is that the side you talk to is the side that shows up for the conversation. Whether they're your teenagers or somebody else's, take them seriously, speak to the mature, growth-oriented side, and you'll see the very best of that kid — and see them move quickly in the right direction.

Teenagers belong to all of us

Think about what it really means to be a teenager: you're changing, everyone around you is changing, your body is changing, you're setting yourself up for your adult life, and you're usually living with folks whose expectations of you may not match your own. It's a lot. Against that backdrop, adults say disparaging things about teenagers all the time — sometimes right in front of them. If we talked about women that way, it would be totally socially unacceptable, yet it's considered okay around teenagers. Teenagers need us; they belong to all of us. It's critically important that we have their backs and that they know we're really there for them.

The takeaway: stress is normal, if uncomfortable. Uncomfortable feelings are helpful, if unwanted. Development is hard — being a person who's growing and changing is inherently stressful, and so is being around people who are, teenagers included. The fact that it's stressful doesn't mean anybody's doing anything wrong. It's just the nature of being a person.