Help Your Teens Navigate Their Emotional Highways

The teen years are powerful and brain-changing, and can present opportunities.

Imagine life with your teens when they are less irritable, more reasonable and logical, and can respond reflectively (not reactively), when feeling hurt, angry, or frustrated. With these changes in their emotional self-management, you could regain your positive, joyful, and supportive relationships.

Source: personal photo

One way to go about this is to help teens understand that rapidly changing structures in their brains promote tumultuous times that can result in unpredictable mood swings and some regrettable choices. When you share this knowledge, you can powerfully impact your teen’s optimism and efforts toward taking control of their emotional responses. Both of your lives will be less stressful when they are empowered to achieve emotional self-management.

What your teens need to know about the changes taking place in their brains.

When they know what is going on in their brains, that neural changes prompt them to act out, take risks, or resist doing schoolwork, they can endeavor to take charge of their feelings and lives. You can’t keep all stress out of their lives, but you can help them develop detours around stress-induced roadblocks to their positive emotions and actions.

Teens need to know that their involuntary, reactive brains, particularly in a high-stress state, activate primitive survival reactions. These fight, flight, or freeze behaviors in a high stress-state are often interpreted as willful acting out, zoning out, or laziness. In fact, teens need to understand that their brains’ automatic survival program is designed to react quickly, not always logically, under high stress.

In addition, emotional mood swings, are a natural part of their adolescent development. Unfortunately, this outcome of the brain’s reactive survival responses can result in teens being blamed for their feelings and having their personalities labeled negatively.

Here are some examples of what to tell your teens to help them achieve awareness that they are not what their labels say (lazy, uncooperative, unmotivated, or willfully disobedient) and engender motivation to take action:

• “There is a roadblock deep in your brain that controls your emotional responses. The structure is called the amygdala.”
• “When you experience high stress, the amygdala becomes over-active and blocks the flow of information into and out of your highest thinking brain (prefrontal cortex), where thoughtful choices are made.”
• “When the amygdala is stressed, it cuts off communication between your self-control executive functions and your thoughtful responses. The emotional and action control systems are taken over by your survival-oriented, brain. At that point, this automatic survival system takes control of what you say and do.”
• “At times of high stress, when your brain is doing what it is programmed to do for survival, others may interpret your actions as intentional. To others, it may appear as if you are choosing to be lazy, irresponsible, or intentionally disruptive, or that you have low intelligence.”

Looking back to guide a better future

During calm times, and with their permission and desire to change, build their awareness of the types of situations when they experienced so much stress that they made choices that they regretted. Here are some examples you can use to start them off.

Common teen reactions: Although trying to pay attention, teenagers under stress, whether from hunger, tiredness, or emotional turmoil, do not have access to their best strategies to remain attentive.

Incorrect impressions: The student doesn’t care about learning, is too lazy to put in the effort, or is scattered, without the desire or ability to focus their attention.

Build their emotional control centers

Guiding your teens to be more thoughtful and calm can seem overwhelming but you can help them build the neural networks of executive functions needed for them to take the driver's seat in managing their emotions.

As you help them understand the tumultuous, rapid reorganization now taking place in their brains, teens can be more self-forgiving about why they don’t always make the best choices. When they can identify the sources of their stress, they can learn how to take action to avoid their brain’s automatic negative reactions and be more reflective in their choices.

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Emotional Control Self-Inventory

By thinking about times when stress put their survival brains in charge, they can gather an inventory of awareness about past reactive behaviors they regretted.

With logic, not blame, help them recall past choices they would have liked to have avoided. These could include telling lies, damaging others’ belongings, blaming others for bad things they did, making regrettable choices, ignoring safety precautions, teasing or saying hurtful things, or failing to stand up for someone who was bullied.

Have them consider the most frequent or distressing situations that stress them out and result in reactive, not reflective actions, for which they have been criticized:

• Trying to pay attention, but losing focus when you’re stressed by hunger, tiredness, or emotional turmoil.
• Answering questions wrong when you are asked in front of the whole class, even though you know the answers, but failing because you’re too nervous to access that memory.
• Forgetting to do an assignment or task you had planned because your reactive brain was all caught up in a fight you had with your friend, or because you were upset by something someone said to you or about you.

Helping them build “top-down” emotional management

Anticipating ahead to the potential triggers they will confront that day or week, alerts their upper brains that there's something coming they want to respond to thoughtfully. With the strategies they have developed to use when stress takes over, the advance warning gives their brains a chance to forge more thoughtful choices.

When they realize what is happening with their brain’s stress response, they can shed blame for some of the bad choices or actions that took place when their brains were not under their thoughtful control. They can move forward to the self-awareness needed to make thoughtful choices and responsible decisions.

Encourage your teens to reflect on and tell you positive results and/or better feelings they experience from their efforts at self-control. The more often they reflect on the positive outcomes of their efforts, the stronger their motivation will be to use their tools to confront future challenges.

Optimal outcomes

With understanding, teens can reach the important realization that while their brains have a strong, automatic, negative stress response system—that they have the power to embrace thoughtful control and top-down emotional management.