--:-- Mel Robbins: Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. Okay, so today you're going to meet an expert that I picked up the phone and called and begged to come on the show because I've been getting email after email after comment asking for advice on a very specific topic. Mel, how do I help people in my life who are struggling? I'm sure it's on your mind. I know it's on my mind.
--:-- Mel Robbins: We all know someone who is having a really hard time right now in their lives or maybe even in life in general. It might be your spouse. It could be a friend. Maybe it's a family member. Or perhaps it's one of your kids. So I tracked down the very best resource, somebody that was a lifeline for me for years as I was navigating all kinds of issues with our kids as they were growing up. And her advice has even been life-changing when my husband Chris was struggling with depression and I just wasn't sure what to do.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You may know her from her extraordinarily popular article in the New York Times, Motherlode. Or you might know her from her three New York Times bestselling books. Who am I talking about? I'm talking about Dr. Lisa Damour. She's a clinical psychologist, a New York Times bestselling author. She has a PhD from the University of Michigan and an undergraduate degree from Yale. She is one of the world's leading experts in parenting, education, childhood development, stress, and anxiety. And she has been a real lifeline for me.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And this is not a conversation, by the way, it's just about teenagers that are struggling. Yes, we will talk about teenagers specifically. But this is a conversation that is going to leave you feeling hopeful, empowered. We are going to role play different scenarios. You're going to leave here knowing exactly what to do and what to say and not say to the people in your life that are struggling. Her latest book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers is a must read. This is a conversation I've been dying to have. I am absolutely thrilled to introduce you and me to Dr. Lisa Damour. Welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Oh Mel, thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited. I have so much I want to talk to you about.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I do have a confession. You were a tow rope that dragged me up the hill of parenting teenage daughters because I was an avid Motherlode reader and disciple. So thank you for your work.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: That means so much. You have no idea what a difference it made.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And when I saw that you were releasing yet another book, your latest book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, I thought, oh, wow. What was it that made you want to write this latest book, Lisa?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: There were two things that really drove me to do it. One was, of course, what teenagers went through in the last several years. And I've been practicing with adolescents for coming on 30 years now. I got my PhD 26 years ago and I was taking care of teenagers while I was in training. And I've never seen anything like it. I've never seen teenagers go through such a hard time.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: The other force that got me to my computer to bang out this book was that the way we talk about mental health as a culture does not square with how we as psychologists understand it. And what I mean by that is that so much of the discourse about mental health suggests that being mentally healthy means feeling good or calm or relaxed or at ease. And those are all good things, but those do not actually factor into how psychologists assess mental health. When we're looking at it, we're looking for two things. Do the feelings fit the circumstance? And are they managed well?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: So we expect to see distress. You know, if somebody gets dumped in a romance, we expect sadness. We expect them to be really heartbroken and maybe bitter and a little angry. Like those are all appropriate emotions. What we're really interested in is what does the kid do next, right? Do they weep? Do they talk to their friends? Do they get their ice cream? Like do they do things to help themselves feel better? Or do they trash that kid online? Do they turn it against themselves? Do they smoke a ton of weed, right? Like we only worry when we're in that second category of unhealthy coping. That's what we're most interested in.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, what's immediately striking to me is that this applies to people of all ages, right?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Absolutely.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That what I have noticed is that people's ability to tolerate uncomfortable emotions and the ups and downs in life have gotten way worse over time.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: It's true. I think we have run into a situation where for far too many people, uncomfortable feels like unmanageable. That there's not a distinction between those two. And it's an important distinction because discomfort is part of life and teenagers are going to feel it. Adults are going to feel it. And it's important and we want to care for people under those conditions. But we don't want to assume that discomfort means that everything must stop and it cannot be managed. Some people find themselves there. And then we have the full force of our clinical supports that we can bring to that. But those are two very different things.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want to break apart the two reasons why you wrote the book. One being the impact when March 2020 dropped like a bomb on all of us and everybody's lives got turned upside down. You write extensively about the specific impact that it had on the lives of teenagers. And just for the sake of this conversation, when you say teenager, what age group are you talking about?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: It's a critically important question. So adolescence begins at 11. And this is something that psychologists have done a terrible job of getting out to the public. Most people think they're teen because they hear teen at the end of that and they think teenager. We have always marked the onset of adolescence at age 11. And that is because adolescence begins when puberty is underway. And by 11, most kids, even if you can't see it on the outside, they are underway with puberty.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: And we mark the end of adolescence. You can push it as far as 24, 25. You can hear the asterisk in my voice on that. By and large, their brains are in great shape, very fully developed by 18, 19, 20. But their better reasoning is still more readily knocked offline until they're about 24, 25. So if they're very stirred up, young adults don't always handle things as well as they will after 24, 25. But I always get a little uncomfortable when people are like, oh, their brains are not developed until they're 24, 25. I'm like, well, but look at that English paper that kid wrote. Look at that beautiful piece of art that kid made. Like, that's a developed brain. But we're talking a big window here. I mean, 11 to 24, 25. Those are very wide range of numbers and very different kinds of people filling in that space.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yes. Okay, good. I'm so glad we started there because I also honestly would lump in adults that are emotionally immature and have never matured in terms of their emotional processing. But I'm glad that we're talking really the range of early middle school all the way through college. And we're going to go step by step in just a minute around how the world turning upside down and going into lockdown and all of the isolation and complicated feelings that happen, how it impacted this age group specifically.
--:-- Mel Robbins: But I want to talk first about the second reason why you wrote the book, because this applies to all of us. What you're saying is that there's a difference between what you know clinically and what people believe is the baseline, that mental health does not mean be happy. What does it mean to be mentally well?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: What it means is that the emotions you have are actually in concert with what's happening in your world. And I think that mental health is often defined by experiencing distress. And that is 180 from where the culture is right now. So often mental health concerns and distress are treated as though they are one and the same. But I'll give you several examples. It's so easy of where the presence of distress is actually evidence of mental health, right?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: So if the kid gets dumped, we expect distress. The absence of it would be concerning. If a teenager has a huge test tomorrow and they have not started studying, we want to see some anxiety. The absence of anxiety is more concerning than the presence of anxiety. If someone's really mean to you, right? If you're a teenager or an adult and someone's really mean to you, we expect to see hurt and then probably of self-protective anger. Those are all unpleasant emotions. Those are all unwanted emotions. Those are evidence that we work exactly as we should. And so to pathologize all of that means that people are spending their normal, healthy days feeling like there's something wrong with them, when in fact, that distress is proof that they work perfectly.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Lisa, you're a genius. I just had this huge breakthrough because you're right. We have just painted with such a broad stroke that guilt, fear, shame, anger, upset, heartbreak, that somehow that makes you weak when what you're actually saying is no, no, no, no, no. If it's occurring in reaction to the appropriate situation, that is a sign that you're mentally well.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Absolutely. And it's also data. That's the other way we think about all of our feelings, negative and positive. They tell us how things are going. So if every time you have lunch with somebody, you walk away feeling kind of stepped on and diminished, that's really good data. Don't have lunch with that person if you can help it, right? And if you go to a job interview and it feels just thrilling to be in the space, like that's good data. Emotions, psychologists are surprisingly agnostic about them. Like we don't really value positive ones over negative ones. It's just all information. And our job is to take it in.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow, I love this reframe. I absolutely love it. I would love to tease this out a little bit more because I think this applies to all of us.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: It does.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I want to hear a quick word from our sponsors because they're bringing us this incredible information at zero cost. But when we return, Dr. Lisa, I have a question for you. How do you know when it's just a normal upsetting or distressing emotion versus something that you actually should be concerned about? We're going to answer that when we return. Don't go anywhere.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins, and I am here with Dr. Lisa Damour, one of the world's leading experts in parenting, education, childhood development, stress, and anxiety. And we are getting a master class in how to deal with distressing emotions, how to know when things are a real problem. And we're about to dive into the tools, tactics, and scripts that you can use to help somebody that you love who's struggling. So Lisa, what is a normal emotion and what's not? I guess what I mean by that question is, how do we tell the difference between something that is just an awful situation where you got to ride the wave versus something that we should be concerned about?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: So there's a few ways. I mean, part of it is there's no real right feeling, right? You have the feelings you have. And I think that I would never want to say, we always expect to see this feeling under these circumstances, because of course our feelings are informed by who we are, our histories, what's come before. So there's not always a perfect map of what we expect to see. And here again, psychologists can just usually take a much more curious, like borderline anthropological stance towards emotion as opposed to judging or valuing.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: But here's what we don't want to see. We don't want to see emotions getting in the way of people's lives. That's where we start to be concerned. So we fully expect to see sadness under sad conditions. We don't expect to see depression, which is where mood becomes so low that it really casts a pall over everything in a person's life. We fully expect to see anxiety if there's something wrong, right? If there's danger around you or a lethal virus in the environment, right? We expect to see anxiety. But we don't expect anxiety to become paralyzing and get in the way of people's ability to do the things that really are safe or they can and should be able to do.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: So for us, the index is really much more about functioning and do emotions undermine the ability to function well in the world? Because they should be supporting our ability to navigate our lives and deepen our relationships. They shouldn't be getting in the way.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So the real takeaway here for all of us is that distressing emotion is part of being mentally well. But when you start opting out of seeing friends and you stop the hygiene protocol of taking showers and exercising and eating, or you start over medicating your feelings with alcohol or weed or whatever, that's the red flag.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: That's right. I'm going to even tease that apart a little bit more. So the emotions can either get in the way, right? So mood that actually disturbs the ability to live one's life. Or, and you moved in this direction, and it's such a critically important direction, what I would call costly coping. So people are coping with moods, but they're doing it in ways that come at a cost. So either abusing substances or being incredibly hard on the people around them or turning it against themselves, whether they're running themselves down or even engaging in self-harm. Those may be actually providing some relief. People only do things that actually work for them, but they come with a price tag. So that's the other thing we look for. So we look for a mood that gets in the way of the ability to live one's life or coping that is a costly way to go about things, if not immediately, certainly over time. Those are the flags that we keep an eye out for.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I got it. Two flags, mood and costly coping. And I want to role play for a little bit, if that's cool, because I love to leave our audience in action and empowered. So if you're in a situation where let's just talk about the costly coping stuff that you talked about. I can't tell you how many parents and friends we would confide in one another during the last three years. My kids are completely off the rails. Like they're not even showing up for the Zoom classes. My son is hitting the vape, smoking weed, playing video games for six hours a day. I don't even care anymore. The stress level is so high. As long as they're waking up in the morning and they're not mean to me, how do you, as a parent or a friend or a partner of somebody, you see somebody smoking too much weed, playing video games for too long, those sort of coping mechanisms that you write, let you escape. How do you even begin to approach it? Because every time we would approach it in our household, you get the big shove back.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: So I think the first step is to really recognize that it is working for that person, that it is serving a purpose. And you described that, right? That substances can help numb distress. They're incredibly effective at that. That's the problem with them, right? Is that they work to make pain go away.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh my gosh. Hold on a second. Can I just stop there? I don't know that I've ever heard anybody ever hit the pause button and tell the truth that people engage in these behaviors because they work for them, which is why they become so damn defensive when you try to take them away from them.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Exactly. Wow. You know, this is where I just, I'm so glad I got the training I did when I did, because the premise of my whole training is that humans are rational actors. They don't do things that don't serve a purpose. Even if those things outwardly end up causing so much trouble, there's always a rationale. And that's actually the best part about my job is that when people come my way clinically, my job is to figure out, you know, you're doing this thing that is just damaging your life and getting in the way. We have to understand why so that you then can feel like you've got some choices.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. I'm just letting the profound nature of what you're asking us to do, because I can think of several friends who had daughters in particular, self-harm, cutting, very self-destructive behavior. And from the outside, you look at it and you panic and then you make it wrong and you'd want to do anything because you love this person to stop it. But I think it means that we're missing this critical step in connecting, which helps us lead to the problem solving. So why is it so important, even though it's terrifying when your kid is hurting themselves or they're clearly escaping and addicted, why is it so important to say to yourself, this is a coping mechanism that's working for my kid and I actually have to start there?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Here's why it's so important. Because the alternative is a dead end. And what I mean by that is that if you come at a kid or anyone saying, you need to stop and then fill in the blank, what you're going to run into is the part of them that is like, you don't get why this is working for me. And now you have a conflict. If you go the route of saying, you're a smart kid, you wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't working for you at some level, the conflict ends up in the kid or the adult that you're trying to help between the part of them that doesn't want to be cutting or abusing substances or playing video games eight hours a day. Or running around and sleeping with the wrong people, which is what I was doing in high school, but okay. I mean, whatever it takes to help yourself feel better.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: So there's a part of them that doesn't want to be doing those things. And there's a part of them that is doing those things. And the job of the helpful outsider is to try to get a conflict going between those two parts of the person who is doing the thing and to stick up for the side that wants to be healthier.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: I'll tell you the language that I remember when I learned this as a clinician around if a client comes in and is talking about suicide, right, which is, of course, terrifying. And I remember the day I learned the language from a senior clinician to say to someone, listen, clearly part of you is really thinking about hurting yourself, but part of you wants help. And that's the part that's telling me that you're having those thoughts. I'm going to stick up for the part of you that wants help. And that's how you don't turn it into a fight.
--:-- Mel Robbins: That's incredible, and I've got a pen in my hand. So this is one of those conversations where I'm having a conversation and furiously scribbling notes, which I don't know why I have to do that given that I can listen to this again. But there's a part of you that is really considering this, or there's a part of you that is in so much pain that you're resorting to cutting to feel alive. Or you're in so much pain that you're smoking dope so that you can just numb out and forget about it. But there's a part of you that wants help. And that's the part of you that I'm speaking to. Did I get that right?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Yeah. You just say you wouldn't be letting me know if you didn't want help. There's a part of you that wants help.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What do you do if they didn't tell you? Or you don't, you know what I mean? Because a lot of times, particularly with these behaviors, people hide them.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: It's true. So eventually you find out or you smell the weed coming out of their room or you notice that a young person has harmed themselves. So I think the first thing we want to do as sort of the helpful people who are trying to step in is to get to a place with ourselves where we feel a bit centered. Reacting strongly in those moments does not go well. But then I think it does sometimes happen that you have to confront a person about their behavior. And again, I think teaming up with them and teaming up with what I know all teenagers have and all adults have, which is that growth-giving, health-seeking side, is the way to go. So I think, let's just use marijuana as an example and you can smell it.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I'll be the kid.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Okay.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Ooh, I can't wait for this. I want to hear a quick word from our sponsors. I can already feel you, Dr. Lisa, outside the door, and I'm the kid in the bedroom rolling up the joint, okay? But we're going to take a quick break. Our sponsors bring us all of this at zero cost to you, so I want to give them your time and attention. And when we come back, Dr. Lisa's going to be knocking on my door while I light up a doobie. Don't go anywhere.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I'm with New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Lisa Damour, and we're about to role play here. Me, I'm the weed smoking teen sitting in my bedroom, no clue that mom's standing outside. And Dr. Lisa, she is going to play the role of the calm, centered parent and walk us through step by step how you and I are supposed to handle these kinds of stressful situations. Here we go.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Okay. So I'm sitting in my room. I'm teenage Mel. I'm rolling up a big doobie. I'm lighting it up. I'm puffing away. I don't even know my mom's outside. I'm listening to music. I'm texting my friends. I got my headphones on. I don't know that you're home because I didn't even hear the garage doors open. So there I am.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Okay. And here I come. So knock, knock, knock on the door. No answer. So I let myself in. Right. And I say, oh, buddy, oh, buddy, you and I both know that smoking weed like this is going to get in the way of the kind of life you want to lead. We got to figure out what's getting in the way of you making different choices.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Whoa. Like you just spoke to a different part of me.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: That's the goal, right? That's the goal.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Now, do you leave the room? Do you just drop it like a grenade and then let that kind of settle for them? Or do you sit down on the bed? Because I think we just don't know what to do. And then we get so emotional that we react, which makes it worse.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Well, I think I'd see what the kid does. I mean, I'd sort of take the cue from them. I mean, because he just did say something. I think we also have to give kids room to come to where we are, right? I mean, I think it's so hard in parenting so often. And I have two teenagers myself, right? So often in parenting, we have a full head of steam. They walk in the door and they're like, we need to talk about, boom, right? And the kid's like, whoa, like I was going to go get a snack, right? I was not ready for this conversation.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Plus now I'm high, mom, and my tongue feels like it's filled my mouth. I can't have a conversation with you.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: So then I think, let's just say for the sake of argument, like this isn't a great time to have the conversation because the kid is not entirely available to it. And then I think you say, you know, we're going to have to have a conversation about what's happening here. And my favorite phrase, and I also remember the moment I learned this in my training is, because what we're doing isn't working. What you're doing isn't working, right? And that's the thing about substances. They do get to a place where they start to undermine a person's life. They're not showing up at school or they're under functioning academically, or they aren't actually maintaining friendships, or they're not contributing to the home or the community. And so that becomes the thing. Like you can't keep doing this because what you're doing isn't working. We have to come up with something else. So if you're in so much pain that you're doing this, we're going to find another way for you to address that pain. But the goal, and you can hear this in every approach, is to not turn it into a showdown between the person who's trying to help and the person they want to help.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It just had this visual of kind of that you're right it is a showdown. The knock on the door, the screaming, the shame, and now you're putting your 40 or 50 year old angst about this onto your 16 year old and it just compounds everything that they're trying to escape anyway. If you can center yourself and realize you're trying to get on the same page with the part of them that wants to do better. Instead of pounding on the door, literally putting your arm around them. You know, like buddy, I love that you're like, hey, buddy, you know, and I love this. I wish I had talked to you two years ago because that what you're doing isn't working.
--:-- Mel Robbins: When my husband's depression came to a head, I was the bitch on the door knocking. I was trying to say what you're doing isn't working. And instead of course I'm like, you know, thank god you're doing yoga and all this stuff because you'd probably be dead if you weren't, but you got to start that. You got to get in therapy and you got to take... But what I wish I would have known and what I hope everybody's taking away is that phrase, what you're doing isn't working. We got to do something else.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: And I'll tell you about... So when I was in training, I had a really brilliant and terrifying supervisor and she said to me, you get eight words in utterance. When you're listening and sitting with a client, they can say as much as they want to say. You can't go past eight words. And the reason for this is as soon as you're past eight words, you're into somebody's head. You've bypassed their heart, right? But if you can keep it tight and if you can go to the core of it in eight words or fewer, it lands. And so what's interesting is that discipline of needing to find just the arrow and the through line, that's how I've ended up actually being able to translate over into writing and podcasting and all of the other forms of work I do. Because if you're doing good clinical work, you're just going for the central message as cleanly and as easily understood as possible.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I love how you simplified this for us. You have really drawn this highlighter and highlighted the notion that distress is a really important part of being mentally well. And it's only when it becomes destructive to your mood and your daily functioning or you start having costly coping mechanisms that we got to sound the alarm, so to speak, because what they're doing is working for them to escape or cope. But it's not helping. And you are like an arrow hitting the target, Lisa. Like this is your genius. That your job is to appeal to the greater part of them, what you're doing isn't working. And I'm here to help you figure out what could work.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Exactly.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. You also write in your latest bestseller, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, that there is a difference with how the different genders cope with stress. Can you walk us through that?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Sure. Let me say a whole bunch of caveats first. 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. Male, female, we are sort of at 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.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: So having said that, when we look at traditional gender categories, a pretty consistent, broad finding is that when they are in distress, girls are more likely to discuss and boys are more likely to distract. And these are both 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Can you 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.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Absolutely. And what gets to be on the fringe. Absolutely. So discuss, you know, 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 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. Like good outcome. We like that.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: What 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. And then four other girls hop been on this. There's two problems with this. One is girls are more likely than boys to engage in vicarious distress. Meaning if my friend's upset, now I'm upset too. So it has this like widening swath of distress. The other thing is that it threatens to turn into what psychologists call rumination. Though it's kind of gross, it's a really helpful metaphor. It's like picking at an emotional wound, right? 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.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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, right?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Nobody knows he's in pain. 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 paths is that girls get better and better and better at talking about feelings because 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.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: So the ideal management is somewhere in between, a little discussing, 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: These are so relatable. And I know so many people in our family and also friends who—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, just holding on to it. How do you approach that with somebody?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: So I think that, let me do the girl example version and then let's think. Yes, let's go rumination. Let's just go right down that rumination road. So what I encourage parents and also peers to do, if they're caring for a teenager who is really spinning their wheels, is to say to them, "Listen, talking about feelings usually helps. But what I'm noticing is the more we're talking, the worse you feel. So let's do this. Let's put a pin in this. Let's make a plan to talk about it tomorrow. What time do you have? What time do I have? We'll schedule it. We're coming back to it. But between now and then, let's just do something else. Let's go think about something else. Let's just take a mental vacation from this situation."
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: And what is extraordinary is it's so often when you do that, when I've met with that kid the next day or talked to the person the next day, they're like, "Yeah, I don't know what I was so upset about." Like 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 thing that just popped up.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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 resolved.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah. Yeah. What about with the boys? How do you approach that where, or any behavior of just distraction and kind of 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: So it's interesting. Distraction can end up as costly coping, right? We can go right back to that category. 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 because he hasn't done his homework and he needs to go to bed. 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. Is there another way you could help yourself feel better?"
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Now, the thing here about boys and expression, right? That's really what's underneath this is getting kids, but boys in particular, to talk about feelings. 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. Parents of adolescent boys in particular who become very, very Sphinx-like and very, very reserved. And I think that's its own fascinating and complex universe to make sense of. I think that's its whole 45-minute conversation, don't you?
--:-- Mel Robbins: It's a big one. It's a big one and it's an important one and it can be done.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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 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: 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. And the fact that, and it still happens today. We joke in our family, Lisa, and you may have, as you're hearing me explain this, you probably have somebody in your life who does this. They emotionally dump on me.
--:-- Mel Robbins: So I've realized that when our daughters want to chat, they call my husband. And they have wonderful conversations about their life and what's going on in their relationships and what they need help with. When there is any kind of upsetting or distressing situation, I will get three FaceTime calls in a row until I pick up. I get the tears, the venting, the frustration, the world is ending. And then it's all done. They go back to their life. And I feel like somebody has thrown a bucket of slime on top of me. And now, of course, I'm all worked up. And your research shows that this is normal. And it has a name. This is normal behavior? In teenagers?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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. Like I remember getting her on the phone.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Yeah, you did too, right?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: And so, and I remember like 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 like I got to go." Right? So I hang up the phone, I go out with my roommate, have a super good time. And I remember my mom called me the next day and she's like, "Are you okay?" And I'm like, "Yeah, like, I don't know what your problem is, but I'm fine." And my dad told me later, like she'd been up all night. I mean, she was getting ready to like pack the cooler and drive across the plains to retrieve me.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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 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 dumped the trash. Like, don't ask me about it. I'm not going to answer your texts. I'm not going to pick up your phone calls. Like, just take the trash and make it go away."
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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, it's fine." I mean, and it was as 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."
--:-- Mel Robbins: And I should probably apologize, Lisa, to my mom because I would call her every day from the pay phone 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 will come back home and you'll go to the community college and that'll be that." I never called her again.
--:-- Mel Robbins: But then our daughters, both, that same scenario the first couple weeks of school, just processing the hard emotion. But it's so liberating to hear that it's normal. And so should we just kind of 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: 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?" 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, right, and just let them unload all of that garbage into the bag. And then when the call is over, dispose of it. 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 yeah, you don't need to then go through the trash yourself.
--:-- Mel Robbins: You could have saved me years in marriage counseling because I feel like a lot of the times that 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. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for writing about that.
--:-- Mel Robbins: One final question about this. When do you know it's time to get a therapist involved? And how do you look for one, the right one?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: So I think we would go back to the "what we're doing isn't working." Okay. And we're not able to find another way. The things we're trying aren't helping, right? Because nobody starts at a therapist, right? They try at home to make things better. Yeah. And so I think if you feel like 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.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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, 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.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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 like, "You know what, you need to talk to a pro," right? Then the kid's like, "Oh my gosh, like this is exactly like my secret concern is now confirmed." So I always am very careful about how I broach 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." That is just a tiny shift that can make an enormous difference.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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 of people who care for teenagers very quickly. It takes a long time actually to become trained at it.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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 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 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: 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Let's pivot to this accelerating mental health crisis that we are reading about, we are experiencing. Lisa, I don't have a single friend who doesn't have a family member who is spiraling. And all through the kind of lockdown and coming out of the last three years, it doesn't feel like a new normal. It feels like there is something that's been bubbling underneath the surface. And if it hasn't already erupted with the young people in your life, it feels like everybody is very tender. And so I would love for you to talk about what you've seen and what your concerns are about what and how this age group, 11 to 25 roughly, experienced the last three years social isolation and lockdown?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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. 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, were glad to be home. 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.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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. That is its own like 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, were actually incapable.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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 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 because they're noticing people doing it. And 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.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: And I watch kids who really were incredibly strong academically, greater, I mean, absolutely, completely unable to do school. There are 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, right, 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.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: I will tell you, Mel, and you know from having read my work, like I am generally, kids are resilient. It's all good. Like 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: Wow. What do we need to know? Because, you know, 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 like daily ricocheting emotion about, "Are we going back? Are we not going back? Who's going back? Am I going to live off?" Like 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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, re-triggered. 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. 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: I think the best language for this is to think in terms of delay, not loss. Though there's a lot of loss. And, you know, like what your daughters like, they lost elements of college that they're never getting back. And I think that needs to be acknowledged as 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.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: I really do think that development is like 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. And 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? We would have 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.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: I also think we got to look for the big stuff. So we had talked about suicidality. Let's just hit it head on because it's the scariest thing. So it is true now that thoughts of suicide are actually not rare. I don't have the statistics at my fingertips, but I know that when we've looked before 2000, we would take surveys of adolescents and the frequency with which the thought had crossed their mind. And it's not rare. And I remember being a teenager and like 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.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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." 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. I need to ask, have you had any thoughts of harming yourself or ending your life?"
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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'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: Thank you. And it was very reassuring to hear the research that teenagers are just glad you asked. They're glad you asked. Yeah. We did an 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 big, scary thoughts like that freshman year. And I had no idea.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Yeah.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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 him feel better. And so I love that you just gave us permission based on the research to just ask and they will feel better. Even if the thought didn't even cross my mind, thank you for checking in.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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, you know, 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, of the emotional experience. And I'm convinced everybody's nervous system is in fight or flight still.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: I'm with you on the nervous system stuff. I mean, that really rocked our world. And when we think about really hugely unsettling events, they do sort of rewire our nervous system. And I think that we're having to find our way through that. Two things. We are seeing aftermath. And we can be very specific about that. I really worry about eating disorders. I really worry about kids who are abusing substances. We don't know yet what the snapshot of mental health is right this minute for teenagers. And part of what's confusing is that in February of this year, the CDC released a report that was very devastating about adolescent mental health. But what's important about those numbers is that they were collected in the fall of 2021 asking about mood over the previous year.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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. They were all entering their third school year. Either they were going 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, like, we kind of don't know and we won't know for about another 18 months where we stand now.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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 adolescence, right? Which is also rich and spicy on a good day, but it's typical, right? So, but the things I worry about, I worry about increased isolation. People spend more time away from one another. I worry about eating disorders in kids of all genders. We have traditionally attached these to girls. That's not actually how it works.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: And I worry about, we haven't talked about social media. It's a big topic. And I feel very, 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 the kids who were stuck at home who felt like they were gonna use that time to get in shape, right, 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.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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 because 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 ultra fit, 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: I can't agree more. In fact, it happened to our daughter. And I remember when she got into treatment for disordered eating, she ended up deleting her VSCO and her Instagram. And she said, like, "My entire feed is basically models and waist 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, 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 control?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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 feels out of control. "Here's one thing I can 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, right? Who would have 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 because I might as well do something to make myself better," finger quote, better in this time.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: But I do also just think if all you're looking at are ultra thin, ultra fit 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: 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 gonna run the 5K and now they're gonna get in triathlons or now everyone's like, "Oh, you look great in that bathing suit." Where is the line where it's a healthy thing versus this is now something that's scary? Because I miss the signs.
--:-- Mel Robbins: And kids are also remarkable at just kind of, "Oh, it's fine. You know, I'm just—" and then because it's in this lane of, but they look better, but they say they're going for a run. How do I insert myself here? How do you do that?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: It's tricky and it is easy to miss. So some framing stuff. One is teenagers shouldn't be losing weight. Usually they're gaining weight in the course of typical development and later puberty. So if you notice that your teenager has lost weight, you should be attentive to that. It's an unusual thing for teenagers to do.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: It's not all bad. You can talk with your pediatrician. There are some teenagers who the pediatrician may say this weight is not in a healthy place, and losing some weight would be healthier. Then you can do that with a nutritionist and the pediatrician in a controlled and careful way.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: But one thing I've learned from my colleagues in the eating disorder world is, by the time a teenager is losing weight, something's usually up. I think that's a valuable marker to have.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: The other thing to watch out for is dropping entire food categories. I'll put it this way: Not everybody who becomes a vegetarian goes on to develop an eating disorder. But everybody who goes on to develop an eating disorder drops a food category.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh my God. 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 there are a lot of people in her age group that are gluten-free or vegan or dairy-free. It is a socially acceptable and praised way to have disordered eating. It's not actually an allergy. It's crossed a line. Is that what you're talking about?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: It's a flag. One of the ways I assess that flag is I'll sometimes care for teenagers who say, "I don't eat sugar." 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.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: There's what people say and what people do. 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. Those are some flags to keep an eye out for.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: If concerns really start to rise, we can go back to where we started around people having two sides. It's the job of all of us—and teenagers are developing in their capacity—to take good care of ourselves. If a teenager is suddenly eating nothing but celery and running a lot, that kid is not taking good care of themselves.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: 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 a variety of nutrition? Are you being gentle enough on your body? Exercise, yes, but not to the point of injury." Use that as a guardrail. The goal is for the teenager to be doing an excellent job of caring for themselves.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Beautiful. I worry a lot about how we seem to have a parenting crisis of parents who can't tolerate their kids' 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: Well, thank you for bringing this up. It's a huge topic. Between *Untangled* and *The Emotional Lives of Teenagers*, I published a book called *Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls*. What I hear all the time is 80% applies to kids of all genders.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: In that book, I make a case for healthy anxiety and healthy stress. We have always recognized that healthy anxiety is the anxiety that alerts us when something's wrong. It is not on its own pathological. We have not helped the situation by using the same word to describe healthy anxiety and something we diagnose. We have the word "sadness" and we have "depression" for the diagnosis, but we use "anxiety" in both categories. That doesn't help.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Same with stress. Stress is the human experience of adaptation. We experience stress anytime things change, anytime we have to adapt to a new condition. It can be a wonderful condition or a lousy condition, but we always experience stress under changed conditions. We only consider stress pathological if it is chronic or traumatic. All other stress goes into the "helping you grow doesn't always feel good" category.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: The most important thing for people to know about anxiety is that avoidance feeds anxiety. This is one of the most critical findings in psychology, and we have done a completely terrible job of getting it out to the public. Here's how it works.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Let's say I have some social anxiety, and there's a party I've been invited to. It's a rational party—a friend's party that should be fun. But I feel anxious. I agree to go, but the day of, my anxiety starts accelerating. I think, "I don't think I should go." And say my parent says, "It's just a party. You don't have to go."
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Here's what happens. First, I feel so much better. My anxiety is cresting, and then I get to avoid, and it immediately plummets. That's what we call reinforcement—instant relief. The upshot is that next time I feel anxious, I know what helps me feel better: avoidance. That's the first problem.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: The second problem is that I never go to the party and check out how it is. Whatever I have daydreamed about how terrifying the party is or how cruel everyone will be is now sealed in amber. I continue to believe it because I have no counter-evidence. If I go to the party, I think, "Oh wait, it's not so bad." But if I don't go, it entrenches anxiety to avoid the things we fear.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: If a kid is avoiding school—which a lot of kids are right now—there's a third issue. The minute you don't show up at school, you are out of the loop socially and academically. It's that much harder to get back in.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: There is not a lot in psychology where there is agreement across the entire field, where there is zero controversy. But on this one, everyone agrees that avoidance feeds anxiety, and everyone agrees that exposure is the answer. 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 of avoidance. You cannot have the daydream become the reality.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: If this is your kid and they say, "I can't go to school, I can't go to the party," you say, "Here's the deal. You're going to go to the party for 20 minutes. I'm going to forget something and text you to see if you need me to pick you up. If you need me to pick you up after 20 minutes, I'll get you. But if you can stay, that would be better." You have to negotiate. You have to help them get in.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Breathing is powerful for controlling anxiety. Reframing is powerful for controlling anxiety. But avoidance is anxiety's best friend.
--:-- Mel Robbins: It's devastating because you're right. I think about the fact that I was homesick at every camp, so much so that I would escalate it until the counselors got so tired and my parents would show up. Because it works. It goes back to your original thing. We do these things because they work. 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I want to ask you one final question. 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. If you had to bottom-line the way you want us to think about your role in a teenager's life, what are we there to provide for them as parents, uncles, aunts, mentors, teachers, doctors? How do we show up in this cauldron of emotion and uncertainty?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: I can say it in two words. But Mel, this is to be filed under "easy to say, very hard to do." Our job is to try to be a steady presence.
--:-- Mel Robbins: What does that mean?
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: It means that when teenagers are having their big feelings, and their feelings are big, and they come our way with their big feelings, we don't meet them where they are. We don't get as agitated as they are. We can listen, be attentive, and offer empathy—which a huge percentage of the time is all they want.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: There are two reasons why this is critically important. One is that when teenagers are bringing us their concerns, they're watching our reaction. If they're having a really bad 15-year-old day, and they bring it to us, and we hit the ceiling, they can't help but think, "Oh my gosh, I thought this was 15-year-old-size bad. It turns out it's 52-year-old-size bad." That is not reassuring to them.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: The other thing is when we offer empathy as the response. We're there, and we're empathic with whatever their distress is. I think that is the all-time steady presence move. You are highly present. You are empathizing. You are saying, "That stinks. I am sorry. I wish that had not happened." 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 becoming highly agitated.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Deep empathy and just listening goes so much further than we sometimes give it credit for. Even if there's more to be done, starting with empathy is never a bad move. A huge percentage of the time, it gives teenagers everything that they want and need.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Wow. I love your phrase, "It stinks." Because you're right. If there are big emotions, that's all you need to say. "That stinks." I never really thought about it from the standpoint that if I get distressed, I magnify their distress.
--:-- Mel Robbins: I think I'm going to use the power of objectivity and use you as my avatar. The next time Kendall FaceTimes me—she graduates from college a week from Thursday—I'm just sort of waiting for the roller coaster. I am going to embody you. I'm going to just be a steady presence. I'm going to realize that the emotions 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? 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."
--:-- Mel Robbins: Because that's normal. It's actually a sign that she's mentally well.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Oh my gosh. The evidence of her perfect functioning. The same is true with the adults in your life. If the big feelings and the distress are related to a corresponding event that makes sense, they're mentally well.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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. I find your work so helpful because it is always grounded in a larger framing. The advice that sounds simple is suddenly so profound because you understand it in the context of the larger framing. Thank you.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: I'm so glad I can be helpful.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Oh my gosh. It's a hard time to be a person, and it's a hard time to be raising teenagers. Here's what I want people to know. We have studied adolescent mental health for decades. 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, 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.
--:-- Dr. Lisa Damour: Well, thank you for giving us the tools to be able to show up and do just that. It's an honor to be here.
--:-- Mel Robbins: Well, it's incredible to talk to you. You are so cool. I got so much out of that conversation. Holy smokes. I wish she lived closer to me. Don't 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. I'm so happy we're doing this thing called life together.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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.
--:-- Mel Robbins: 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.
