“So much to do, so much to take care of! All the time I feel nervous, worried about what I may have forgotten, what I’m behind in, and what’s ahead. It’s hard to sleep—that’s why I’m tired all the time. That’s why I feel out of control. The pressure won’t go away. It wears me down so I’m not feeling well. Headaches, stomachaches, colds that keep hanging on. When you’re independent, the demands come from all directions, and they never stop. There are no parents to take care of things. No comforts that you used to take for granted. That’s why I’m taking a break. Living back home for a while is a lot simpler than living on my own.”
For the older adolescent, the first time away from home and shouldering all the demands of independence can be a lot of responsibility to bear. With the age of much more freedom comes an increase in lifestyle stress.
Excess often becomes the order of the day, as young people vacillate between unhealthy extremes. Too much of one activity (such as spending or socializing) makes them decide to cut back and then do too little; too little rebounds into too much, and round and round the indulgence-deprivation cycle spins. The result can be that young people think in extremes and take extreme measures to regulate their lives, in a frantic struggle for self-control. As one young woman described it: “I can’t get it right. First I starved after I binged and then I binged after I starved. I couldn’t even control my eating out! The same with exercising. It was either all-out or doing nothing! I was yo-yo living!”
The last stage of adolescence is not a moderate age: young people feel compelled to place extreme demands on themselves. This tyranny of extremes takes many forms and lasts until young people can reconcile and discipline themselves to the notion that “some” is enough—that excess is easy, abstinence hard, and moderation hardest of all. Until then, cycling between extremes to gain control causes young people to feel out of control in a number of areas, such as the following:
In consequence, in this last adolescent passage, many people go through periods of feeling stressed—anxious and exhausted, frustrated and confused, scattered and overwhelmed. It’s really hard to organize all these new freedoms and new demands in a sustainable way. And when older adolescents can’t, when they come home to regroup and recover, there are usually three challenges that they have yet to master that parents can help them address:
Consider a young college student who was sent home the spring of her freshman year, not so much for failing grades as for failing health. “Mono [mononucleosis] is what the dean’s office told us,” the parents explained. “Our daughter told us the rest. We had no idea. She said she just took on too much, was worried and stressed out all the time, didn’t sleep well or eat right, got rundown so she was feeling tired all the time, with aches and pains that wouldn’t go away. She finally ran out of energy and collapsed with exhaustion. That’s when she went to the health center; then the dean called us. So now she’s home for a few months’ rest and recuperation to get her strength back up. We’re trying to figure out what to tell her so this doesn’t happen again when she goes back.”
What might they say? They should tell her about stress—what it is, where it typically comes from, and how to manage life so that stress is an occasional occurrence and not a chronic condition.
Stress education is an important part of life management. It helps prepare older adolescents to cope with the increased and unrelenting daily demands that more independence brings. When a young person comes home during trial independence because the demands of independence felt overwhelming, there is some instruction that parents can helpfully provide.
The experience of too much demand, or what I call “over-demand,” is the most common source of stress at this age. Why? Parents can explain it this way. Meeting demands takes energy, and everyone’s supply of energy (their potential for doing and action) is limited. When the demand exceeds their readily available response energy, people rely on stress to force their system to meet dire circumstances—like staying up all night at college to get a paper done at the last minute.
Stress is a survival response. It forces the human system to generate emergency energy to cope with excessive demand. It helps people meet the challenge or get the job done, but always at a cost. A common example that most young people can relate to is having to juggle the demands of a job and schoolwork. Faced with multiple class assignments due on the same day that one is scheduled to work, the sense of overdemand creates two unsettling questions: “Can I get it all done?” and “If I can’t get it all done, what will happen to me?” These can be scary questions.
Stress is a survival response for coping when overdemand exceeds one’s readily available supply of energy, thereby creating a threatening sense of urgency or emergency. This is why the dominant emotion of stress is some level of anxiety. Relying on stress allows the young person to meet extreme demands, but at the same time incurs a variety of psychological and physical costs, anxiety being one.
So, in addition to explaining what stress is and where it comes from, it is important for parents to help children see the costs they pay to endure stress. In ascending order of severity, consider four levels of stress that parents and children should be aware of. At each level, stress announces itself in a different way:
The purpose of parents, taking this inventory is to teach their children how to assess their own stress by asking and answering these questions for themselves. Because these levels of stress are frequently cumulative, by the time someone reaches the last stage breakdown, he or she is usually burdened by some degree of fatigue, pain, and burnout. Tell young people that they must constantly monitor their well-being, because the effects of continual stress from overdemand can be serious. Also tell them that they shouldn’t just ignore signs of stress, pop a pill to medicate away the symptom, or artificially boost energy with chemical stimulation, but they should instead attend to what the warning signs are saying.
Finally, parents should teach young people how to moderate their stress by taking control of the three gatekeepers to demand: personal goals, standards, and limits.
Each of these three gatekeepers controls a significant source of demands, and hence of stress. The higher young people’s goals, standards, and limits are, the more demand they build into their life and the more they risk stress from overdemand.
To reduce this stress, they must moderate demand, and doing so is under their control. The three gatekeepers to demand are not genetically ordained; they are chosen, so they are subject to regulation. Young people who are relentless strivers, driven perfectionists, or compulsive pleasers often find themselves laboring under constant stress and paying the attendant costs. “What I’ve learned,” confessed one young casualty of stress, “is that I can’t have it all, I can’t excel at it all, and I can’t do it all.”
This is why, when overstressed young people return home, parents need to help them take personal responsibility for resetting these three gatekeepers of demand in a way that does not require supreme or overwhelming exertion, only an honest effort. Parents can say, “We need to talk with you about setting reasonable goals and standards and limits for yourself, because how much stress you’re under partly depends on how demanding you want your life to be.” This is how moderation is accomplished.
There is one final choice for young people to consider, and that is uttering a single word that, more than any other, restrains demand: no. If young people can’t say no to themselves, that means they can’t resist the temptation of doing one more thing. If they can’t say no to others, that means they can’t risk turning others down and possibly incurring their displeasure. People of any age who can’t say no are at risk of leading a very stressful, high-demand life. By teaching young people that it is OK to say no, parents can give them one of the most important tools for managing stress in their life.
Another aspect of controlling stress during this time of late-adolescent change, in addition to avoiding cycling between extremes and being willing to moderate demands, is investing in activities that maintain adequate wellness.
In this last stage of adolescence, many young people simply do not take care of their basic operational health needs. So excited by all the new freedoms more independence brings, and beset by many new demands, they often neglect basic self-care and run themselves down in the process.
The third key to recovery from stress is maintaining sufficient wellness. Young people can do this by taking steps to keep their energy (their capacity for doing and action) in healthy supply from one day to the next. However, in urging this, parents often run into an intergenerational value difference that confounds them.
For a young person, it is important to invest energy in what’s new, different, more, better, and faster—to get stimulation and create excitement. So partying, spending, staying up late, “burning the candle at both ends,” eating on the run, keeping up with the latest fad or fashion, and consuming energy drinks for artificial stimulation all fuel this high-octane lifestyle. The young person’s priority is change (too much maintenance is boring).
For parents, guiding values tend in the direction of conserving energy by honoring what’s old, the same, doing less, accepting good enough, and going slower—to keep oneself renewed and restored. So adequate nutrition, rest, sleep, exercise, contentment, and relaxation are of a higher priority. They want to keep themselves in good working order, in contrast to their son or daughter, who just wants to keep on the go. The parent’s priority is maintenance (too much change is exhausting).
Of course, the message here is not either all change or all maintenance but achieving a balance between the two. The goal for continued vitality is to regularly maintain health and to invest in sufficient change to create growth.
But young people during trial independence do not handle self-maintenance well, and they commonly fall into a stressful lifestyle through one of two ways:
This difference in energy priorities—between the higher-change and higher-maintenance lifestyles—is not one for parents to argue about with their children. However, parents can encourage a slower pace of living, one that redresses the balance and supports the nourishment of wellness. They can encourage a health maintenance regimen for young people to follow to get in the habit of investing in regular self-care. For example, they can help their child get into the daily habit of eating regularly and nutritiously, getting sufficient sleep, moderating substance use, exercising, and engaging in ongoing activities of interest that renew self-esteem and restore well-being. As one parent simply put it to her son: “We want you to get in the habit of taking good care of yourself, and that means consistently maintaining your health is priority number one.”
The most debilitating maintenance deficiency that young people suffer during trial independence is lack of adequate sleep. When all-nighters become the rule—whether to complete an assignment, party late, play a computer game, or just watch TV—young people pay a physical and psychological price. Sleep is fundamentally restorative, so if you want to run your body down, then short yourself on sleep. The warning signs of stress will soon announce themselves: fatigue, physical and psychological complaints, burnout, and breakdown. One of the best ways that parents can explain the seriousness of sleep deprivation is to remind their son or daughter that sleep deprivation is a very common form of torture. So why do they want to torture themselves? And of course, they should beware the stress/sleep cycles: they get insomnia because they can’t sleep for worry, and they stress themselves for lack of sleep; or they sleep all the time to escape stress, and encourage more stress by piling up demands.
By helping young people maintain themselves, parents can help them reduce and handle the stress in their life. But parents also need to be aware of another main source of stress: procrastination.
By the end of high school, a common teenage behavior is procrastination—the act of putting off chores, schoolwork, college or job applications, or other onerous demands as long as possible. Most people first learn procrastination when they start to resist and delay compliance to adult (particularly parental) authority in early adolescence (age 9–13). Now the practice of putting parents off begins in earnest. Then, with continued application, they allow it to mature into a costly habit in the years that follow, when they confront the need or demand for work. Roughly stated, the adolescent work ethic is this: work as hard as you can to work as little as you have to by putting off what you don’t want to do for as long as you can. The shorthand is: work at not working.
To some degree, this attitude remains in play throughout the course of growing up. But it comes into crisis during the final stage of adolescence, when the challenge for young people becomes taking independent charge of their life. The “enemy” to resist when it comes to getting work done is no longer parents; now the young person, not parents, are to blame for dictating terms. With this shift in responsibility, the fight against authority becomes a fight within the young person. So where the rebellious battle cry of the early adolescent against parental authority was “You can’t make me!,” the rebellious battle cry of the last-stage adolescent against his own authority often becomes “I can’t make me!”
A young man put it best when he said, “It’s not that I don’t know what I should do. I tell myself what I should do all the time. The problem is, either it takes forever to make myself do what I want to do and refuse to do, or I don’t get it done at all. Basically, I make lots of promises to myself that I never keep. I can’t be trusted that way. The promise is that there will still be time later to do what I say. But I keep running out of later, so when I get there, there’s no time left to get it done. Then I’m disappointed, or other people are.”
Young people find procrastination costly on two counts. First, they begin relying on stress to get things done. Because procrastination shortens the time available to eventually meet a demand, increasing pressure from a deadline creates stress that enables the procrastinator to get it done. “I have to put it off to pull it off,” explained one young woman. “I have to put myself under the gun before I can get to work—even for myself !” Upon graduating from high school, many young people take this habit with them to a job or to college, which makes meeting the demands in those experiences more stressful, too. For example, stoked with stimulants to stay awake, a young person pulls an all-nighter to get a paper done, staggers to class to turn it in, quickly leaves to go and get a good day’s sleep, and misses lecture content that he or she will be tested on the following week. This creates conditions for later stress, as one delay begets another. At worst, young people can get into catastrophic functioning, or the use of avoidance and delay to purposefully create last-minute, do-or-die crises to motivate the accomplishment of what they must do—be it work or study or some other pressing need.
Second, when the delay causes a missed deadline or opportunity or commitment, the procrastination becomes self-defeating. What one wanted or promised to do for oneself remains undone. Now frustration, regret, disappointment, and even a sense of failure can follow.
Procrastination is a cunning adversary. It promises false hopes for later accomplishments, which in turn justifies current delay and indulgence in pleasures. So a young man continues playing computer games into the night, believing that he will still have time before the next morning’s class to complete the assignment. But then when the morning comes and he has not even started the assignment, he avoids attending class. When procrastination constantly leads to such failures—a deadline missed, a commitment broken—not only is forward motion arrested, but young people also lose self-respect for failing to do what they knew that they needed to do. “I feel helpless over myself !” one young person exclaimed in frustration.
The relationship between procrastination and stress is a complicated one. Procrastination creates stress by increasing time pressure to perform, but that stress then provides the emergency motivation to overcome resistance and get the job done. A dedicated student procrastinator once told me: “The problem with doing work early is that it takes longer because there’s no pressure to get it done. But wait until the last minute, and I rush right through it because I have to.”
“How do you feel after the crisis?” I asked.
“Blown out,” she replied. “But that’s just the price I pay. I work best under pressure.”
What she really means is this: “I can get to work only when I put myself under pressure from delay.”
So parents can objectively describe the five steps for using procrastination as a stress motivator.
For many young people, a confirmed habit of procrastination that they developed by the end of high school can lay a foundation for lifestyle stress that takes hold in trial independence. They seem to have become dependent on stress to get motivated, to get started, to keep going, to get things done, to feel challenged, to feel excited, to feel busy, to feel important, to find meaning, to feel validated by constantly facing too much demand. In all cases of lifestyle stress that I have seen, procrastination is an essential component. The old quote by the cartoonist Walt Kelly best captures this conflicted state: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
How can parents help their son or daughter stop procrastinating, if stopping it is something he or she wants to do? The answer is that they shouldn’t recommend cutting it off abruptly. Procrastination is not something young people do simply because they are lazy or something they can change in an instant. It is a long-practiced, embedded habit of behavior. As one young person posted on one of my parenting blogs for Psychology Today:
“As a twenty-one-year-old who seems to be going through the ‘I can’t make me’ phase, it’s not that I even want to prevent myself from doing things I know are constructive and legitimately would like to do. Even when I’m not doing them, I want to be doing them and know that the best thing for me is to do them. I just proceed to not do them and end up beating myself up over it. I’m not sure if this is normal or pathological, honestly, but I’m nowhere near who I can be and want to be because of it. Consider the possibility of this being the case for your eighteen- to twenty-three-year-old. It may be that they don’t even want to be the way they are and want help changing (but may be afraid to speak).”
A young person such as this young man needs help to change his or her ways. The battle against procrastination can feel like a lonely struggle, so help your child see that you are on his or her side in this fight.
Instead of cutting off procrastination altogether, suggest a gradual approach to reducing procrastination. Each time a young person is inclined to procrastinate in the face of some unwanted demand, parents can encourage him or her to start the task a little earlier than planned. Young people don’t have to fight the habit. They can still procrastinate but can try doing it a little less by slightly moving back the starting time. In many cases, it is easier to reduce procrastination by doing it less than resolving (and usually failing) to cease procrastinating at once.
As the old habit gradually wears away, young people are able to liberate themselves from painful delay, to enjoy the satisfaction that timely accomplishment brings. Their capacity for independence is restored. The antidote to procrastination is determination, because when motivation becomes committed and effort is consistent, the engine of accomplishment is hard to stop.
Stress will come up in everyone’s life, but it should not control anyone’s life. By helping young people learn to moderate demands, maintain their health and well-being, and reduce procrastination, parents will help them lay the foundation for a moderately stressful life.
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