A Yale Psychologist Explains Why Teens are Spiraling (It’s Not What You Think) | Mel Robbins Podcast

1. 0:00 – 7:23

   Intro

   1. MRMel Robbins0:00

      (ticking clock) (upbeat music) Today, you're gonna meet Dr. Lisa Damour. And if you thought the last three years in lockdown impacted you, wait till you hear her describe the impact that it had on young adults. Whether you're worried about kids in your life, or you're worried about somebody else, or you're worried about yourself, this is a remarkable opportunity for you to learn, for you to get scripts, for you to know exactly what to say and do to become a better you. Hey, it's Mel, and welcome to The Mel Robbins Podcast. All righty, welcome. Uh, my name is Mel. I am so excited for today's conversation. You're gonna leave so hopeful, full of strategies that you're gonna put to use immediately. You're gonna feel empowered. If you're brand new to The Mel Robbins Podcast, welcome. Thank you for being here. I'm Mel. I'm a New York Times best-selling author, and I am one of the world's, uh, leading experts on stress, well, actually not stress. I did not, I- I said stress because our expert today is an expert on stress. I talk about behavior change and motivation, and today you're gonna meet Dr. Lisa Damour. She has made such a huge difference in my life. She used to write the article Motherlode for The New York Times. I held on to that article like a blankie when I was parenting our teenage daughters. She is so full of wisdom and just incredible advice and perspective. I also love her voice, wait till you hear voice. You're just gonna feel calm when she comes on. Dr. Lisa Damour is a clinical psychologist. She's a New York Times best-selling author of three, yes, three incredible books. 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, child development, stress and anxiety. And I've invited her on because she not only hosts an incredible podcast called Ask Lisa, but she has changed my life with her three books, Untangled, Under Pressure, which is all about the pressure that girls in particular are feeling, and her latest New York Times best-selling book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers is revolutionary. Uh, she wrote it during the last three years of upheaval, and if you thought the last three years in lockdown impacted you, wait till you hear her describe the impact that it had on young adults. And this is not, by the way, a conversation just for those of us that have kids. This is a conversation for all of us, because we're gonna go deep into the difference between normal big emotions and distress and upsetting situations, which, by the way, are normal, and you need to be able to deal with them. And so you're gonna get tools from her for yourself. You're also gonna get advice about how to help people in your life, not just the kids, cope with very stressful situations. So you're gonna come out of this just armed with things that you can do. But what I love about Dr. Damour's work is that everything that I've ever read also makes me feel smarter, because she helps me understand these big, complicated topics, and I always leave knowing what to say, what to do. And so whether you're worried about kids in your life or you're worried about somebody else, or you're worried about yourself, this is a remarkable opportunity for you to learn, for you to get scripts, for you to know exactly what to say and do to become a better you, and to support the people around you. Her latest book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, is a must-read, in my opinion. This is a conversation I've been dying to have. Dr. Lisa Damour, welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast.

   2. LDDr. Lisa Damour4:11

      Oh, Mel, thanks so much for having me.

   3. MRMel Robbins4:14

      Ah, I'm so excited, I have so much I wanna talk to you about. Um, I do have a confession.

   4. LDDr. Lisa Damour4:19

      Yeah.

   5. MRMel Robbins4:20

      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. Um-

   6. LDDr. Lisa Damour4:39

      That means so much.

   7. MRMel Robbins4:39

      You have no idea what a difference it made, and when I saw that you were releasing yet another book, your latest book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, I thought, "Oh, wow," and this was all written, you know, during the last three years of upheaval, and what was it that made you want to write this latest book, Lisa?

   8. LDDr. Lisa Damour5:03

      So 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. 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, and when we're looking at it, we're looking for two things: Do the feelings fit the circumstance, and are they managed well?So, we expect to see distress. You know, if somebody gets dumped in a romance, (laughs) we expect sadness, we expect them to be really, you know, 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 we're in the, when we're in that second category of unhealthy coping. That's what we're most interested in.

   9. MRMel Robbins6:42

      Well, what's immediately striking to me is that this applies to people of all ages, right? That-

   10. LDDr. Lisa Damour6:53

       Absolutely.

   11. MRMel Robbins6:53

       ... what I have noticed is that there seems to be, and I know that you write about this too, but I am constantly struck by how, um, eloquent people are about, quote, "some mental health thing" or some diagnosis and their ability to talk about it. But it seems as though people's ability to tolerate uncomfortable emotions and the ups and downs in life have gotten way worse over

2. 7:23 – 11:42

   Why uncomfortable has become unmanageable in today’s culture

   1. MRMel Robbins7:23

      time.

   2. LDDr. Lisa Damour7:25

      It's true. I think we have run into a situation where for, far too many people, uncomfortable feels like unmanageable.

   3. MRMel Robbins7:34

      Yes.

   4. LDDr. Lisa Damour7:34

      That there's not a distinction between those two. And it's an important distinction, because discomfort is part of life and teenagers are gonna feel it, adults are gonna feel it. And it's important and we wanna 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.

   5. MRMel Robbins8:04

      I wanna break apart the two reasons why you wrote the book. One being the impact that the last three years, 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?

   6. LDDr. Lisa Damour8:30

      (laughs) That'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. Um, most people think 13 'cause 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's underway, and by 11, most kids, even if you can't see it on the outside, they are underway with puberty, and we mark the end of adolescence, you can push it as far as 24, 25. I, you can hear the asterisk in my voice on that. Um, 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-

   7. MRMel Robbins9:20

      Hmm.

   8. LDDr. Lisa Damour9:20

      ... until they're about 24, 25. So if they're very, very stirred up, late young adults don't always handle things as well as they will, you know, after 24, 25. But I, I always, um, get a little uncomfortable when people are like, "Oh, their brains are not developed till they're 24, 25." I'm like, "Well, but like, look at that English paper that kid wrote. Look at that beautiful piece of art that kid made." (laughs) Like, that's a developed brain. It's just that it can be a little bit, um, you know, easily undermined in terms of their perspective maintaining until they get fully, fully into adulthood. But we're talking a big window here. I mean, 11 to 24, 25, I mean, those are very, very wide range of numbers and very different kinds of people filling in that space.

   9. MRMel Robbins10:06

      Yes. Okay, good. I'm so glad we started there because I also honestly would lump in adults that are emotionally immature-

   10. LDDr. Lisa Damour10:14

       (laughs) .

   11. MRMel Robbins10:14

       ... and has never matured in terms of their emotional processing, but I'm glad that we're talking really the range of kinda early middle school all the way through your through college. And we're gonna go step by step in just a minute around how, uh, the world turning upside down and going into lockdown and all of the isolation and complicated feelings that happened, how it impacted this age group specifically. But I wanna talk first about the second reason why you wrote the book, because this applies to all of us, which is the big disconnect between the wellness industry and a lot of the sort of self-help pop psychology that's out there saying, "You should be happy. You should be this, you should be that." And I say that a lot too. However, there is a major need for people's ability to tolerate the really low moments and the uncomfortable moments, and 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?

   12. LDDr. Lisa Damour11:35

       What it means is that the emotions you have are actually in concert with what's happening in your world.

3. 11:42 – 16:21

   What does it mean to be “mentally well”?

   1. LDDr. Lisa Damour11:42

      And, and I think that, you know, I'll see you and raise you. Mental health is often defined by experiencing distress, and that is so, 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? So if the kid gets dumped, we expect distress. The absence of it would be concerning.

   2. MRMel Robbins12:11

      Oh.

   3. LDDr. Lisa Damour12:11

      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 a 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.

   4. MRMel Robbins12:52

      Lisa, you're a genius.

   5. LDDr. Lisa Damour12:55

      (laughs) No. This is-

   6. MRMel Robbins12:56

      I just had this huge breakthrough, because you're right. We have just painted with such a broad stroke that, you know, guilt, fear, shame, anger, upset, heartbreak, that somehow that, 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."

   7. LDDr. Lisa Damour13:24

      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, you know, go to a job interview and it feels just thrilling to be in the space, like that's good data that we... 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.

   8. MRMel Robbins14:05

      Wow, I love this reframe. I absolutely love it. Um, I would love to tease this out a little bit more because I think this applies to all of us.

   9. LDDr. Lisa Damour14:15

      It does.

   10. MRMel Robbins14:16

       How do you know when it's a normal distressing emotion versus something that you should be concerned about in either yourself or somebody else?

   11. LDDr. Lisa Damour14:34

       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, you know, we always expect to see this feeling under these circumstances because of course our feelings are informed by who we are, our histories, you know, 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 just take a much more curious, like borderline anthropological stance towards emotion as opposed to judging or valuing. 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, um, 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, um, you know, 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. So for us the index is really much more about functioning and-

   12. MRMel Robbins15:55

       Mm-hmm.

   13. LDDr. Lisa Damour15:55

       ... 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.

   14. MRMel Robbins16:06

       So the real kind of takeaway here for all of us is that distressing emotion, it is part of being mentally well, but when you start opting out of seeing friends and you stop

4. 16:21 – 22:05

   What is costly coping and what action to take when doing this

   1. MRMel Robbins16:21

      the, uh, kind of 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?

   2. LDDr. Lisa Damour16:35

      That's right. So there... Let's... I'm gonna even tease that apart a little bit more.

   3. MRMel Robbins16:38

      Awesome.

   4. LDDr. Lisa Damour16:38

      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, you know, 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 two thi- thing we look for. So we look for 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.

   5. MRMel Robbins17:31

      I got it. Two flags, mood and costly coping. And I want to role play for a little bit if that's cool.

   6. LDDr. Lisa Damour17:37

      Sure.

   7. MRMel Robbins17:37

      Because I love to leave our audience in action and empowered, and everybody you have got to go pick up this book. It is not only so enlightening, but it is hopeful.

   8. LDDr. Lisa Damour17:50

      Mm-hmm.

   9. MRMel Robbins17:50

      I, I mean I wish I had this book three years ago and I'm so happy that I have it now because I find that these tactics are incredible not only for our teenagers, all three of them, and our kids are 24 through 18, but also for adults....and for people I work with. And 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, where we would confide in one another, uh, 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. Like, e- 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're right, 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.

   10. LDDr. Lisa Damour19:03

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 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.

   11. MRMel Robbins19:22

       Oh, my gosh. Hold on a second. Can I-

   12. LDDr. Lisa Damour19:24

       Yeah.

   13. MRMel Robbins19:24

       ...just stop there? I don't know that I've ever heard anybody, ever, hit the pause button and m- and tell the truth.

   14. LDDr. Lisa Damour19:36

       Mm-hmm.

   15. MRMel Robbins19:37

       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.

   16. LDDr. Lisa Damour19:46

       Exactly.

   17. MRMel Robbins19:47

       Wow.

   18. LDDr. Lisa Damour19:49

       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 the, 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.

   19. MRMel Robbins20:25

       Wow. Like, I- I'm just... I'm sorry. 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 destr- self-destructive behavior. And from the outside, you look at it and you panic, and then you make it wrong, and you'd wanna do anything, because you love this person, to stop it. But why... Like, 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"?

   20. LDDr. Lisa Damour21:30

       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

5. 22:05 – 29:06

   The parenting advice you need starts with compassion and understanding

   1. LDDr. Lisa Damour22:05

      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-

   2. MRMel Robbins22:15

      Hmm.

   3. LDDr. Lisa Damour22:15

      ...between the part of them that doesn't wanna be cutting or abusing substances or, you know, playing video games eight hours a day-

   4. MRMel Robbins22:24

      Or running around and sleeping with the wrong people, or, which is what I was doing in high school, but okay.

   5. LDDr. Lisa Damour22:29

      Yeah.

   6. MRMel Robbins22:29

      (laughs)

   7. LDDr. Lisa Damour22:30

      Right? I mean, whatever it takes to help yourself feel better. So, there's a part of them that doesn't wanna 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. And- and that, I'll tell you the language that... I remember when I learned this as a clinician, around if a, if a client comes in and is talking about suicide, right, which is of course terrifying-

   8. MRMel Robbins23:06

      Isn't it also normal to have suicidal ideation?

   9. LDDr. Lisa Damour23:08

      Let's come back to that.

   10. MRMel Robbins23:09

       Okay.

   11. LDDr. Lisa Damour23:09

       That's a really critical question. It's a really critical question, but sometimes, um, clients will come in and talk about suicide, 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 gonna stick up for the part of you that wants help." And that's how you don't turn it into a fight.

   12. MRMel Robbins23:40

       That's incredible. And I- I, you can probably hear me, everybody, I've got a pen in my hand.

   13. LDDr. Lisa Damour23:46

       Mm-hmm.

   14. MRMel Robbins23:46

       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 (laughs) -

   15. LDDr. Lisa Damour23:59

       (laughs)

   16. MRMel Robbins23:59

       ...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.

   17. LDDr. Lisa Damour24:22

       Mm-hmm.

   18. MRMel Robbins24:23

       And that's the part of you that I'm speaking to.

   19. LDDr. Lisa Damour24:25

       Yeah.

   20. MRMel Robbins24:26

       Did I get that right?

   21. LDDr. Lisa Damour24:26

       You w- 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. And I'm gonna s-

   22. MRMel Robbins24:32

       What do you do if they didn't tell you? Or you don't... Like, you know what I mean? 'Cause a lot of times, particularly with these behaviors, people hide them.

   23. LDDr. Lisa Damour24:41

       It's true. So eventually, you find out, or you smell the weed coming out of their room, or you, you know, notice that a young person has harmed themself. So, I think the first thing we wanna 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, um, you know, let's just use marijuana as an example, and you can smell it. Okay.

   24. MRMel Robbins25:31

       I'll be the kid.

   25. LDDr. Lisa Damour25:32

       Okay.

   26. MRMel Robbins25:32

       So, I'm sitting in my room. I've lightened up a big doobie.

   27. LDDr. Lisa Damour25:35

       (laughs)

   28. MRMel Robbins25:35

       I'm smoking. I don't even know you're outside, mom-

   29. LDDr. Lisa Damour25:38

       (laughs)

   30. MRMel Robbins25:38

       ...' 'cause I got my headphones on and I'm playing Minecraft, and I'm just, or I'm scrolling on Instagram. I don't think you're home. Didn't hear the garage doors open. There I am in my room.
6. 29:06 – 32:01

   Here’s how I wish I’d handled Chris’s depression differently.

   1. MRMel Robbins29:06

      came to a head, I was the bitch on the door knocking. And what I was trying to say is that... 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, 'cause you'd probably be dead if you weren't, but you gotta start da, da, da..." You know, like, "You gotta get in therapy, and you gotta take..." 'Cause, but what I sh- 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."

   2. LDDr. Lisa Damour29:34

      Mm-hmm. We gotta do something else.

   3. MRMel Robbins29:35

      "We gotta have a diff- We gotta do something else."

   4. LDDr. Lisa Damour29:38

      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. W- When you're listening and sitting with a client, they can say as much as they wanna say. You, 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 passed, bypassed their heart, right?

   5. MRMel Robbins30:05

      Mmm.

   6. LDDr. Lisa Damour30:06

      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, the, and the, and the through line...That's how I've ended up actually being able to translate over into writing and podcasting, and, you know, all of the other forms of work I do. Because if you're doing good clinical work, you're just going for the, the central message as cleanly and as easily understood as possible.

   7. MRMel Robbins30:47

      I love how you simplified this for us, that 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 gotta 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 so your role... And you've just made this, you are like an arrow hitting the target, Leisa. 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."

   8. LDDr. Lisa Damour31:43

      Exactly.

   9. MRMel Robbins31:44

      Wow. What... You, 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?

   10. LDDr. Lisa Damour32:00

       Sure.

7. 32:01 – 36:58

   Let’s look at the difference in emotions between genders.

   1. LDDr. Lisa Damour32:01

      Let me say a whole bunch of caveats first. (laughs)

   2. MRMel Robbins32:03

      Sure.

   3. LDDr. Lisa Damour32:04

      Um, anytime we're looking at gender findings, we're looking at huge numbers. There's tremendous overlap between the genders. And then of course, we've only really studied conventional genders. We've only really studied male/female.

   4. MRMel Robbins32:19

      Mm-hmm.

   5. LDDr. Lisa Damour32:19

      We are slow to the table to study kids who do not fit into one of the traditional categories. So, everything I'm saying needs to sort of be couched in that broader understanding of how we do the research and what we've studied. So, having said that, when we look at traditional gender categories, a pretty consistent broad finding is that when they're in distress, girls are more likely to discuss, and boys are more likely to distract. And these are both actually acceptable forms of managing emotions. There's actually nothing wrong with either. But where we see trouble is if you veer to the extreme, or you use that strategy all the time. That ideally-

   6. MRMel Robbins33:04

      Can you give us an example-

   7. LDDr. Lisa Damour33:05

      Yeah.

   8. MRMel Robbins33:05

      ...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, of helpful coping-

   9. LDDr. Lisa Damour33:15

      Absolutely.

   10. MRMel Robbins33:15

       ...and what gets to be on the fringe?

   11. LDDr. Lisa Damour33:18

       Absolutely. So discuss, you know, so let's say a girl, um, you know, someone's mean to her at school. And she goes and finds her best friend, and she's like, "Ah, you're not gonna believe what so-and-so just did. She was so, you know, such a jerk to me." And her friend says, "Aw, 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. 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 wanna talk about it. But he goes home, and he, um, plays basketball for a little while, blows off steam, gets it out of his system, gets past it, lets it go, moves on. Those are two perfectly reasonable outcomes of those two different strategies. What we don't wanna see is... And I'll just stay with the boy/girl-

   12. MRMel Robbins34:08

       Great.

   13. LDDr. Lisa Damour34:09

       ...stereotypes. We don't wanna see, is girls who then, um, 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, you know, like, critical analysis of the text thread with the girl who was mean, and then four other girls hop in on this. And the two... There's two problems with this. One is, and this is sort of a secondary finding, girls are more likely than boys to engage in vicarious distress. Meaning, "If my friend's upset, now I'm upset too."

   14. MRMel Robbins34:37

       Yes.

   15. LDDr. Lisa Damour34:38

       So it has this like widening, you know, swath of distress. The other thing is that it threatens to determine, turn into what psychologists call rumination, which is basically a-

   16. MRMel Robbins34:48

       Mm-hmm.

   17. LDDr. Lisa Damour34:48

       ...spinning of one's emotional wheels. And though it's kind of gross, it's really helpful metaphor. It's like picking at an emotional wound, 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 wanna see that extreme. And if we go down the boy stereotype, what we don't wanna see is that, you know, 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. Um, because the cost to him is, number one, he's not getting the kind of social support he deserves, right?

   18. MRMel Robbins35:26

       Yeah.

   19. LDDr. Lisa Damour35:26

       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, 'cause they practice it all the time. And boys can get worse and worse and worse at prac- talking about feelings because they're not practicing it with one another especially. And 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. Um, we just don't wanna see anybody leaning too hard on one strategy.

   20. MRMel Robbins36:07

       These were super relatable examples. And again, because I know that what our listeners crave is, "Okay, so what do I do?" Because these are so relatable, and I know so many (laughs) , uh, people in our family and also friends, whose... We're gonna start with the kind of-... uh, 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 the, uh, what happened when mom died and who got what, and, like, just holding onto it. How do you approach that with somebody?

   21. LDDr. Lisa Damour36:53

       So, I think that... Let me do the girl example version, and then-

   22. MRMel Robbins36:57

       Yes.

8. 36:58 – 41:02

   How do you help people in your life who just can’t let it go?

   1. MRMel Robbins36:58

      Let's go rumination. Yes.

   2. LDDr. Lisa Damour36:59

      ...let's think bigger about, like... Let's just go right down the 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, 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, we'll, like, 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." And, and what is extraordinary is that 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've... They're no longer dumping stress hormones into their bloodstream, you know, for that 24 hours they're not thinking about it. So, it helps people to find their feet. So, that's a short-term, you know-

   3. MRMel Robbins38:05

      Right.

   4. LDDr. Lisa Damour38:05

      ... something that just popped up. I think there's probably a different answer for those bigger questions around, you know, people who are struggling to let go of a painful divorce, or struggling to let go of how things went down in the family, you know, as... In the, 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.

   5. MRMel Robbins38:30

      Mm-hmm. Processed. Yeah. Yeah. What about with the boys? How do you approach that, you know, where-

   6. LDDr. Lisa Damour38:36

      Same.

   7. MRMel Robbins38:36

      Or, 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?

   8. LDDr. Lisa Damour38:50

      So, it's interesting. Distraction can end up as costly coping, right? We can go right back to that category-

   9. MRMel Robbins38:57

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   10. LDDr. Lisa Damour38:57

       ... which is, you know, 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 (laughs) 'cause he hasn't done his homework, and he needs to go to bed, right? I mean, it creates its own, you know, 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 to get through it. You can't be doing this so much that you now have a new situation to deal with."

   11. MRMel Robbins39:24

       Yeah.

   12. LDDr. Lisa Damour39:24

       "Is there another way you could help yourself feel better?"

   13. MRMel Robbins39:26

       Hmm.

   14. LDDr. Lisa Damour39:28

       Now, the thing here about boys and expression, right? Like, that's really what's underneath this, is getting kids, but, uh, boys in particular, to talk about feelings, is that there's a lot caught up in why they don't talk about feelings. And, um, I would say it's one of the hardest things in parenting that I hear about, is parents of adolescent boys in particular who become very, very sphinx-like-

   15. MRMel Robbins39:53

       Yes.

   16. LDDr. Lisa Damour39:53

       ... and very, very reserved. And, um, and I think that's its own fascinating and complex universe. Um, we'll have to make sense of-

   17. MRMel Robbins40:04

       We'll have you back to talk about that-

   18. LDDr. Lisa Damour40:05

       Okay.

   19. MRMel Robbins40:05

       ... to make sense of, 'cause I think that's its whole 45-minute conversation, don't you?

   20. LDDr. Lisa Damour40:10

       It's a big one. It's a big one, and it's an important one, and it can be done. But I'll just, for now, I'll just say, expression of emotion takes a lot of forms, and it's not always in language. And what I've really-

   21. MRMel Robbins40:22

       Oh.

   22. LDDr. Lisa Damour40:22

       ... 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.

   23. MRMel Robbins40:35

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

9. 41:02 – 46:49

   Do your kids do this, too? It’s called the “defense of externalization.”

   1. MRMel Robbins41:02

      and the fact that... And it still happens today. I, I, 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. 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 and ba-ba-ba-ba-ba. 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," dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And then it's as if 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?

   2. LDDr. Lisa Damour42:03

      In teenagers. It's actually one of the very few things that is especially organized around adolescence, is the use of the... We call it the defense of externalization. And Mel, I, 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. Yeah, you did too, right? 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 gonna make it. I don't know." Then, like, then I see my roommate, and I'm like, "I gotta go," right? So, I hang up the phone (laughs) . 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," (laughs) 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. So this is not a new maneuver. Teenagers have forever and always done this. It's not a fun maneuver for parents, for sure. Um, but it is also really hard to be a teenager, and they have a lot of big powerful emotions, and I think sometimes the way they get through their day is to conveniently dump them, treat them like emotional trash, I think of, on the people who, um, 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 wanna talk about it. They're like, "No, no, no. I dumped the trash." Like, "Don't ask me about it. I'm not gonna answer your texts. I'm not gonna pick up your phone calls." Like, "Just take the trash and make it go away."

   3. MRMel Robbins43:39

      That's unbelievable.

   4. LDDr. Lisa Damour43:40

      (laughs)

   5. MRMel Robbins43:41

      You're exactly right, 'cause on the receiving end of it, I feel like they've dumped the trash on me. I'm weighted down. I'm worried about it. I'm thinking about it. I just had a sleepless night the other night because of something that one of our daughters is going through, and then I spoke to her in the morning. She's like, "Oh, what? That's fine." I mean, na-na-na-na. And it was as if nothing happened. I'm like, "Excuse me?" D- d- I should have taped the conversation so you heard the DEFCON 10 bomb that you dropped on me.

   6. LDDr. Lisa Damour44:07

      (laughs)

   7. MRMel Robbins44:07

      And I should probably apologize, Lisa, to my mom, because I would call her-

   8. LDDr. Lisa Damour44:10

      I know.

   9. MRMel Robbins44:11

      ... every day from the payphone in my dorm hallway at Dartmouth, collect, to cry and complain. "I don't like it here. I don't know anybody here. Everybody always has their friends here." And it got so bad after two weeks of this that my mom said, (laughs) "You either hang up the fucking phone and don't call me again and get out there and make some friends, or I'm coming to pick you up the next time you call me, and you'll come back home, and you'll go to the community college, and that'll be that." I never called her again.

   10. LDDr. Lisa Damour44:41

       Hm.

   11. MRMel Robbins44:42

       But then our daughters both, that same scenario the first couple weeks of school, just processing the hard emotion. Wow, I, uh, but it's so liberating to hear that it's normal, and so should we just kind of let the trash fly and kinda step out of the way and not feel like we have to collect it? Just let them litter?

   12. LDDr. Lisa Damour45:05

       Yes. And, 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?"

   13. MRMel Robbins45:12

       Mm.

   14. LDDr. Lisa Damour45:12

       And, 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."

   15. MRMel Robbins45:23

       (laughs)

   16. LDDr. Lisa Damour45:24

       Right? And just let them unload all of that garbage into the bag, and then when the call is over, dispose of it, right? Don't carry it around. Don't take it to bed with you, right? Just be like, "That was a garbage collection moment, and the kid needed a place to d- 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.

   17. MRMel Robbins45:49

       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, knowing that the wave is going. Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing about that. One final question about this kind of category, and then I wanna g- jump into the incredible insights that you have about how the last three years, and lockdown in particular, impacted teenagers and young adults specifically, and what you've seen, um, in your work. And so, when do you know it's time to get a therapist involved, and how do you look for one,

10. 46:49 – 50:18

    How do you know when it’s time to get a therapist involved?

    1. MRMel Robbins46:49

       the right one?

    2. LDDr. Lisa Damour46:52

       So, I think we would go back to the what we're doing isn't working.

    3. MRMel Robbins46:56

       Okay.

    4. LDDr. Lisa Damour46:57

       And we're not able to find another way, you know, that, that the things we're trying aren't helping, right? 'Cause nobody starts at a therapist, right? They try at home to make things better.

    5. MRMel Robbins47:09

       Yeah.

    6. LDDr. Lisa Damour47:09

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

    7. MRMel Robbins47:57

       Hm.

    8. LDDr. Lisa Damour47:57

       ... that there's something wrong with them. 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-"

    9. MRMel Robbins48:11

       (laughs)

    10. LDDr. Lisa Damour48:12

        ... "is now, you know, 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."

    11. MRMel Robbins48:31

        Hm.

    12. LDDr. Lisa Damour48:31

        That is a, just a tiny shift that can make an enormous difference. Then there's the issue of finding somebody, and this is hard. And part of what's hard about it is there's just not a lot of clinicians who specialize in caring for teenagers.

    13. MRMel Robbins48:44

        Yeah.

    14. LDDr. Lisa Damour48:45

        And...One thing that really never got discussed in, in the broad conversation about the adolescent mental health crisis, there were two reasons for that crisis. One, what teenagers went through that really, you know, increased their suffering at a very fast pace. And the other, everyone who cares for teenagers was already full in their practice before-

    15. MRMel Robbins49:05

        Oh.

    16. LDDr. Lisa Damour49:06

        ... 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. And so, that was really where things ended up in a bad place, is that the need accelerated and the workforce to address the need cannot be scaled up at that pace. So, finding a clinician is hard. It was hard before 2020, March 2020. It's h- it's hard now. It's getting a little better. What I would say is, in my experience, pediatricians are actually a really good resource. They know your kid. They know the local talent in terms of psychotherapy. They are often good at actually making, doing a good match, you know, 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.

    17. MRMel Robbins50:01

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

11. 50:18 – 58:01

    The impact of the pandemic on adolescence

    1. MRMel Robbins50:18

       about, we are experiencing, um, every single one of us. 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, you know, 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 that there is something going on beneath the surface. 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.

    2. LDDr. Lisa Damour51:19

       Hmm. Well, let's look at it this way. Teenagers have two jobs. Their jobs are to become increasingly independent, and to spend as much time with their friends as possible. And those jobs were made impossible by what they went through. And I'll tell you, Mel, I saw a wide range of responses. A few kids, but this isn't a sign that this was a good thing, were glad to be home, were, you know, anxious about school. Very, very small minority of kids felt some relief under lockdown.

    3. MRMel Robbins51:59

       Yeah.

    4. LDDr. Lisa Damour52:00

       But we now have the reality that they do need to return to the world at large, and that's harder than it was before. Most kids just suffered through it, found their way one way or another while feeling miserable. I mean, they were miserable. And, you know, miserable in all of its variety. You know, some incredibly anxious about what was happening with their social lives. Some, you know, unable to do school in 2D. That is its own, like, fascinating universe, um, 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 it was, as it was collapsed into a 2D space were actually incapable.

    5. MRMel Robbins52:48

       Hmm.

    6. LDDr. Lisa Damour52:48

       And it got me thinking, you know, this is, you can hear I get excited about the phenomenology of this. Like, it got me thinking about, oh, we never knew that so much of what kids g- kept some kids organized at school was moving physically from room to room.

    7. MRMel Robbins53:01

       Yes.

    8. LDDr. Lisa Damour53:01

       So, oh, I must be in this class now, 'cause I'm sitting next to the kid I sit next to in this class. I'm gonna 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.

    9. MRMel Robbins53:13

       Hmm.

    10. LDDr. Lisa Damour53:13

        Or they knew that it was time to start writing down notes, 'cause they're noticing people doing it. I, I just became completely fascinated by all of these ancillary supports that we had never thought about, 'cause we had never been put in a position to think about. And I watched kids who really were incredibly strong academically, crater. I mean, absolutely be completely unable to do school. There were also kids who could do school, they just hated it, and they did it and they hated it. Um, 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, you know, so much weed that it really probably changed their developmental trajectory, at least for a while, who ended up in just rip-roaring, um, social conflicts that, you know, I think were-

    11. MRMel Robbins54:11

        Yeah.

    12. LDDr. Lisa Damour54:11

        ... partly to deal with boredom, and partly out of desperation, and partly out of who knows what. I will tell you, Mel, and you know from having read my work, like, I am generally on the like, you know, "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. That, um... And that part is alarming to me, and I don't get alarmed very easily.

    13. MRMel Robbins54:48

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

    14. LDDr. Lisa Damour56:18

        I think the best language for this is to think in terms of delay, not loss.

    15. MRMel Robbins56:23

        Okay.

    16. LDDr. Lisa Damour56:23

        Though there is 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-

    17. MRMel Robbins56:30

        Mm-hmm.

    18. LDDr. Lisa Damour56:30

        ... 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, um, developing one's peer relationships and increasing reliance on peer relationships and moving out into the pure world, we just have to accept that there's a delay in that.

    19. MRMel Robbins56:52

        Hmm.

    20. LDDr. Lisa Damour56:52

        And there's no getting around the fact that there's a delay. I really do think that development is, like, the most powerful force in the world and kids will find their way back o- onto a trajectory that works for them. I really do know that, um, humans as a group bend towards health, but sometimes I, 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, you know, what's, how kids look academically, you know, which they, 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?"

    21. MRMel Robbins57:31

        That's true.

    22. LDDr. Lisa Damour57:31

        We would've been thinking (laughs) -

    23. MRMel Robbins57:32

        That's true.

    24. LDDr. Lisa Damour57:32

        ... like, "What have we been doing all this time requiring them to show up for school?" So, we just have to say, "They're gonna be delayed because they missed out." And, and that language, I think, is better than a lost language. I also think we gotta look for the big stuff. So, we talked about suicidality. Let's just hit it head on, 'cause-

    25. MRMel Robbins57:51

        Yep.

    26. LDDr. Lisa Damour57:52

        ... there's, it's the scariest thing. So, it is true now that thoughts of suicide are actually not rare, that I don't have the statistics at my, at

12. 58:01 – 1:01:17

    When are suicide thoughts normal and when are they concerning?

    1. LDDr. Lisa Damour58:01

       my fingertips, but I know that when we've looked, you know, w- you know, before 2000, you know, we would take surveys of adolescents and the frequency at which, with which they, you know, the thought had crossed their mind.

    2. MRMel Robbins58:12

       Right.

    3. LDDr. Lisa Damour58:12

       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, couldn't, if I hurt myself right now, she'd, you know, she'd feel so bad," right? So, did I think about it? Yes. Was I, was I, myself close to doing it? No. Right? So, I, I do want people to know that. If you have a worry about a teenager or anybody in your life around questions of whether they are suicidal, what we recommend as psychologists is you just have to ask. You have to ask. And, and here's how I would have you do it. Um, I would say to the person, "Listen, I need to ask you a question, and this may feel out of the blue," you know, something like that. "But because of..." 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-"

    4. MRMel Robbins59:04

       Mm-hmm.

    5. LDDr. Lisa Damour59:04

       "... I need to ask, have you had any thoughts of harming yourself or ending your life?" And the reason we're reluctant to do this is we're afraid we're gonna give the person the idea that's a concern. We know that's not a concern. What we do know, when we have researched adolescents, is if a teenager is thinking about suicide, they're glad you asked. So, I think we start with the scariest-

    6. MRMel Robbins59:27

       Wow.

    7. LDDr. Lisa Damour59:28

       ... thing and how to address the scariest thing, and then we can go, I think, down the line of, um, of more manageable concerns. But that is the one we just have to address very directly.

    8. MRMel Robbins59:38

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

    9. LDDr. Lisa Damour59:44

       They're glad you asked.

    10. MRMel Robbins59:45

        Yeah. We had, we-

    11. LDDr. Lisa Damour59:46

        Yeah.

    12. MRMel Robbins59:46

        ... we did a, a episode with my, our 18-year-old son now where he disclosed, uh, to me on the episode, uh, I did not know that this was the case, that he had had big scary thoughts like that freshman year, and I had no idea.

    13. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:00:01

        Yeah.

    14. MRMel Robbins1:00:02

        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 hadn't even crossed our mind, thank you for checking in. I, um, would love for you to help us understand some of the issues that you've seen coming out of this and how to, how to, 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 "back to school" and back to this, that there's still this delay and there's still this hangover, so to speak-

    15. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:01:07

        Yeah.

    16. MRMel Robbins1:01:07

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

    17. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:01:14

        I'm with you on the nervous system stuff. I mean, that really rocked our

13. 1:01:17 – 1:03:00

    What happened to our nervous system during this time?

    1. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:01:17

       world. And, and when we think about, you know, really, um, hugely unsettling events, they do sort of rewire our nervous system, and I think that we're having to find our way through that. Um, two things. We are seeing aftermath, and, and we can be very specific about that. I really worry about eating disorders. I really worry about kids who are, um, 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.

    2. MRMel Robbins1:02:02

       Oh.

    3. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:02:03

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

    4. MRMel Robbins1:02:16

       Mm.

    5. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:02:16

       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, you know, still hybrid and unhappy. So it was a very particular time. So just to, um, say, like, we kind of don't know, and we won't know for about another 18 months where we stand now. Anecdotally, and this is important to say, for kids who are back to their regular routines, they look to me like kids did before 2020. That-

    6. MRMel Robbins1:02:43

       Awesome.

    7. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:02:43

       ...I'm seeing a lot of just typical adolescents, right? Which is also rich and spicy on a good day, but it's typical, right?

    8. MRMel Robbins1:02:50

       (laughs)

    9. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:02:51

       So... But the things I worry about, I worry about increased isolation. People spend more time away from one another. Um, I worry

14. 1:03:00 – 1:07:36

    These are the concerns of Dr. Damour that we should watch for.

    1. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:03:00

       about eating disorders in kids of all genders. We have traditionally attached these to girls. That's not actually how it works. And I worry about... You know, we haven't talked about social media. It's a big topic, and I feel very, um... I feel like it's way more complicated than just, you know, all good or all bad. I worry about the norms in digital environments where kids hang out. And what I mean by that is that one thing I feel that we definitely saw between March 2020 and then the subsequent years was that kids who were stuck at home who felt like they were 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, you know, lose weight and here's an advertisement for it. Teenagers are vulnerable to norms. They are more vulnerable to norms than kids are. They are more vulnerable to norms than adults are. And I... 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 gotta watch where kids are online now and forever because the norms are powerful.

    2. MRMel Robbins1:04:43

       I can't agree more. In fact, uh, it happened to our daughter.

    3. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:04:48

       Mm-hmm.

    4. MRMel Robbins1:04:48

       And, um, I remember when she got into treatment, uh, for disordered eating, she ended up deleting her Visco and her Instagram, and I don't even think TikTok was really a thing because this was back in high school, so it hadn't quite exploded yet. And, uh, she said, like, "My entire feed is basically models and waist trainers and, uh, puppies, and it makes me feel terrible. And I keep looking at these images, and it makes me feel like I'm... I, like, 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?

    5. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:05:43

       It's interesting. I wrote a piece for The Times, um, I think it came out in April 2021, about the spike in eating disorders, and there's a variety of reasons that, that can come into it. So some is everything feels out of control. Here's one thing I can't control. That can be really powerful. Another that one of the experts I interviewed referenced that I thought was really important is that we had a lot of very hard driving teenagers with a whole lot of energy who suddenly couldn't do the things they usually did, right, who would have poured their, you know, gross 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," you know, finger quote, "better" in this time. Um, 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-

    6. MRMel Robbins1:06:46

       Mmm.

    7. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:06:47

       ...your sense of what bodies looks like changes and your view of your own body changes.

    8. MRMel Robbins1:06:52

       I wanna ask you a very specific question on this topic because I all- 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 now gonna run the 5K, and now they're gonna get in triathlons, or now, you know, 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

15. 1:07:36 – 1:16:32

    When do healthy habits become an obsession?

    1. MRMel Robbins1:07:36

       something that's scary? And I'm not, I, I think we all know when somebody has stopped eating, when they're deteriorating in terms of their weight, but how do you, like when in, when, 'cause I miss the signs.

    2. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:07:50

       Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

    3. MRMel Robbins1:07:51

       And kids are also remarkable at just kind of, "Oh, it's fine," you know, or just, (whines) . And then because it's in this lane of, "But they look better, but they're exercising, but this, but they say they're going for a run, um, how do I insert myself here?" How do you do that?

    4. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:08:10

       It's tricky, and it is easy to miss. Um, so some framing stuff. One is, teenagers shouldn't be losing the weight. And usually they're gaining weight, in- in the course of typical development and pos- late- later puberty, you know, that they're gaining weight and they're gaining strength. So, if you notice that your teenager has lost weight, you should be attentive to that. That's just an unusual thing for teenagers to do.

    5. MRMel Robbins1:08:41

       Huh.

    6. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:08:42

       And it's not all bad. I mean, you can talk with your pediatrician, and, you know, there are some teenagers who the pediatrician may say, you know, your, "This weight is not in a healthy place. You know, losing some weight would be a healthier thing to do." Then you can do that with the nutritionist and the pediatrician, and do it in a controlled and careful way. But one thing I've learned from my colleagues in the eating disorder world is by the time a teenager's losing weight, something's usually up.

    7. MRMel Robbins1:09:07

       Wow.

    8. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:09:07

       And I think that's just a valuable, you know, marker to have. The other thing that we wanna watch out for is dropping entire food categories. So I'll put it this way. Not everybody who becomes a vegetarian goes on to develop an eating disorder. Everybody who goes on to developing an eating disorder drops a food category.

    9. MRMel Robbins1:09:29

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

    10. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:10:21

        It, it's a flag. It's a flag. And one of the ways I sometimes assess that flag is I'll sometimes care for teenagers who are like, "I don't eat sugar." And I'll be like, "Hmm," right. Am I, 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. (laughs)

    11. MRMel Robbins1:10:42

        (laughs) Okay.

    12. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:10:42

        So there's like one people say and what people do, and what we want, fundamentally, is to see that food is a pleasure, that it is a wonderful source of energy, that there's variety in a young person's diet and in any of our diets. So those are the flags, those are some flags to keep an eye out for. And then, I would say if concerns really start to rise, we can actually go back to where we started around people having two sides.

    13. MRMel Robbins1:11:09

        Mm.

    14. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:11:09

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

    15. MRMel Robbins1:11:57

        Beautiful. Um, just a couple more questions. One that I had is, um, I worry a lot about anxiety, and I worry about how we seem to have a parenting crisis of parents who can't tolerate their kids' anxiety and are allowing their kids' anxiety to run the house. Can you give us some advice, especially given that teenagers are so, 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?

    16. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:12:46

        Well, thank you for bringing up this, I mean, it's a huge topic. Um, and actually between Untangled and The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, I published a book called Under Pressure: Confronting the Epidemic of Stress and Anxiety in Girls. But what I hear all the time is 80% applies to kids of all genders, which I am sure is true. And in that book, I actually make...... at the outset, a case for healthy anxiety and a case for healthy stress. And we have always, as psychologists, recognized that there... Healthy anxiety is the anxiety that alerts us when something's wrong. It is not, on its own, pathological, and it... It... We have not helped the situation by using the same word to describe-

    17. MRMel Robbins1:13:24

        Mm-hmm.

    18. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:13:24

        ... healthy anxiety and something that we diagnose. Um, it's, sort of, better sa- We have the word sadness, and we have depression for the diagnosis, but we use anxiety, you know, in both categories, so that doesn't help us as much. And same with stress. Stress is actually the human experience of adaptation.

    19. MRMel Robbins1:13:40

        Hmm.

    20. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:13:40

        We experience stress anytime things change, anytime we have to adapt to a new condition. And it could be a wonderful condition or a lousy condition, but we always experience stress under changed conditions. And we only consider stress pathological if it is chronic or traumatic. But all other stress, we just tuck into the, you know, "helping you grow" but doesn't-always-feel-good category. Um, what I will tell you is that the most important thing for people to know about anxiety is that avoidance feeds anxiety. And this is one of the, again, most critical findings in psychology and one that we have done a completely terrible job of getting out to the public, and here's how it works. If I, let's say, have some social avoidance, some social anxiety, and there's a party that I've been invited to, and it's a good party to go to, right? It's a rational, like, should be fun, friend of mine's party. But say I feel anxious, and say I agree to go to the party, but then the day of, my anxiety is starting to really accelerate, and then I'm thinking, "I don't think I should go. I don't wanna go." And say my parent is like, "Uh, it's just a party. You don't have to go," right? Here's what happens. The first thing that happens is I feel so much better, right? My anxiety was cresting, and then I get to avoid, and it immediately plummets. It's like what we call reinforcement, right? Instantly relief. And so the upshot of that is the next time, next time I feel anxious, I know what helps me feel better. It's avoidance. So, that's the first problem. The second problem is that I never go to the party and check out how, how it is, right? So, whatever I have daydreamed about how terrifying this party is or how to... Uh, you know, like-

    21. MRMel Robbins1:15:23

        Hmm.

    22. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:15:23

        ... how cruel everyone will be at the party, that is now sealed in amber, and I continue to believe it 'cause I have no counterevidence. Whereas if I go to the party, I'm like, "Oh, wait, it's not so bad." But if I don't go... So, it actually entrenches anxiety to avoid the things we fear. Now, if a kid is avoiding school, which a lot of kids are right now, there's a third issue, which is the minute you don't s- show up at school, you are out of the loop socially and you are out of the loop academically. So, it's that much harder to get back in. So, there's not a lot in psychology where there is agreement across the entire field, where there is zero controversy. But on this one, everyone's in agreement that avoidance feeds anxiety, and everyone is in agreement that exposure is the answer. And what I mean by that is you have to get in. You have to... You know, 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 avoi- avoidance. You cannot have the daydream become the reality. And so if this is your kid and they're like, "I can't go to school. I can't go to the party. I can't..." you know, fill in the blank. You say, "All right.

16. 1:16:32 – 1:18:07

    How do you let kids have emotions without letting them run the home?

    1. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:16:32

       Here's the deal. You're gonna go to the party for 20 minutes, and then I'm gonna forget something and text you (laughs) and see if, you know, you need me to pick you up. And if you need me to pick you up after 20 minutes, I'll get you. But if you can stay, that would be better." So, you have to negotiate. You have to help them get in. Breathing is powerful for helping to control anxiety. Reframing is powerful for helping to control anxiety. But avoidance is anxiety's best friend.

    2. MRMel Robbins1:16:57

       It's devastating 'cause it... You're right. Like, I think about the fact that I was homesick at every camp, so much so that I would just escalate it until the counselors got so tired, then my parents would show up 'cause it works. It goes back to your original thing. We do these things because they work.

    3. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:17:12

       They work.

    4. MRMel Robbins1:17:13

       And when we allow our kid to keep transferring from one school to another because they can't handle it, we are locking in anxiety as a coping mechanism and avoidance as a coping mechanism. Wow. You are so good.

    5. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:17:29

       (laughs)

    6. MRMel Robbins1:17:30

       I wanna ask you one final question, which is, if you had to bottom line it, to make it really simple, because clearly it's very complicated (laughs) to, um, 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,

17. 1:18:07 – 1:25:23

    Here is the most important thing you can offer your teen.

    1. MRMel Robbins1:18:07

       mentors, teachers, doctors? What, what... How do we show up in this cauldron of emotion and uncertainty?

    2. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:18:16

       I can say it in two words, but, Mel, this is, uh, to be filed under "easy to say, very hard to do." Our job is to try to be a steady presence.

    3. MRMel Robbins1:18:26

       Hmm. What does that mean?

    4. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:18:35

       That means that when teenagers are having their big feelings, and their feelings are big, and they come our way with their big feelings, that we don't meet them where they are. We don't get as agitated as they are.

    5. MRMel Robbins1:18:47

       Oh.

    6. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:18:48

       That we can listen, be attentive, and offer empathy, which a huge percentage of the time is all they want. And there's two reasons why this is critically important. One is that when teenagers are bringing us their concerns, they're watching our reaction, and-... if they're having a really bad 15-year-old day, and then they bring it to us, and then we hit the ceiling, they can't help but think, "Oh my gosh, I thought this was like 15-year-old size bad. It turns out it's 52-year-old size bad," right? So, that is not reassuring to them. And then the other thing is, when we offer empathy as a response, so we're there, we're there and we're empathic with whatever their distress is, I think that is actually the all-time steady presence move, because what you're doing is you're highly present. You are empathizing, you are saying, "That stinks. I am sorry. I wish that had not happened." So, you are there for it, but you're incredibly steady. You are not picking up the phone. You are not canceling plans. You are not yourself becoming highly agitated. And so, deep empathy and just listening goes so much further than we sometimes give it credit for.

    7. MRMel Robbins1:20:04

       Hmm.

    8. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:20:04

       And even if there's more to be done, starting with empathy is never a bad move, and a huge percentage of the time gives teenagers everything that they want and need.

    9. MRMel Robbins1:20:16

       Wow. I- I- I love your phrase, "It stinks," 'cause you're right. If there are big emotions, that's all you need to say, "That stinks."

    10. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:20:24

        Yeah.

    11. MRMel Robbins1:20:24

        And if you... I- I never really thought about it from the standpoint that if I get distressed, I magnify their distress, and if I embody... I- I think I'm going to use, uh, the power of objectivity and use you as my avatar-

    12. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:20:42

        (laughs)

    13. MRMel Robbins1:20:42

        ... and the next time Kendall FaceTimes me, 'cause, you know, she graduates from college, uh, a week from Thursday, and so I'm just sort of, like, waiting for the roller coaster, and I am gonna embody you. I'm going to just be a steady presence, and I'm gonna realize that the emotions that she's going to feel, from the grief, to the excitement, to the fear, to the sadness, I just have to hold space for it. I don't need to project, "Oh no, what if it triggers an eating disorder? What if this happens? What if the uh, the hey, the hey... cr- cheer up, calm down, it's gonna be okay." Like, I don't have to do any of that. I just have to say, "It stinks." Wow. Because that's normal, and it's actually a sign that she's mentally well.

    14. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:21:31

        (laughs)

    15. MRMel Robbins1:21:31

        Oh my gosh.

    16. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:21:31

        It's exactly the evidence of her perfect functioning.

    17. MRMel Robbins1:21:34

        And, and the same is true with the adults in your life, that if the big feelings and the distress is related to a corresponding event that makes sense, they're mentally well. That is a revelation.

    18. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:21:49

        (laughs)

    19. MRMel Robbins1:21:49

        A revelation. Everybody, you have got to pick up this book, The Emotional Lives of Teenagers. I cannot tell you how helpful, hopeful, encouraging, empowering it is. You've done it again. You've dragged me through motherhood with Motherload, and you now taught us so much when it comes to... You know, when, when you kinda tease out the advice, Lisa, it always is kinda like a giant duh, not your advice necessarily, clearly, since all of a bit I'm like, "Holy shit"-

    20. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:22:19

        (laughs)

    21. MRMel Robbins1:22:19

        ... but I find your work so helpful because it is always grounded in a larger framing. And so the advice that sounds simple is suddenly so profound because you understand it in the context of the larger framing.

    22. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:22:37

        Thank you. I- I- I'm so glad I can be helpful.

    23. MRMel Robbins1:22:41

        Oh my gosh.

    24. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:22:42

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

    25. MRMel Robbins1:22:46

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

    26. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:22:56

        Here's what I want people to know. We have studied adolescent mental health for decades, and the single most powerful force for protecting teenage mental health is strong relationships with caring adults.

    27. MRMel Robbins1:23:10

        Hmm.

    28. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:23:11

        We're not gonna medicate or therapize our way out of this adolescent mental health crisis. It's gonna be about the adults around teenagers, parents, caregivers, parents, caregivers, bosses, mentors, coaches, teachers, being there for teenagers and being invested in their emotional lives. That's how we're gonna find our way through this.

    29. MRMel Robbins1:23:34

        Well, thank you for giving us the tools to be able to show up and do just that.

    30. LDDr. Lisa Damour1:23:38

        It's an honor to be here.

Episode duration: 1:25:23