Helping Older Teenagers Cope With End-of-Adolescence Stress

Source: Carl Pickhardt, Ph.D.

As described in my previous post, the end of adolescence and onset of more grown-up demands can be physically and emotionally stressful. Increased complexity of life must be managed before adjustment to independence is responsibly made.

For most young people, operating as an adult takes some reach and getting used to.

From what I saw in counseling, where I witnessed young people struggling to cope during this vulnerable transition (I called it "trial independence"), exercising three kinds of skills can sometimes make a positive difference:

1. Being able to monitor common levels of stress;
2. Being able to moderate the amount of self-demand;
3. Being able to support and maintain personal well-being.

Let's take these one at a time.

Monitoring Stress

While stress is multiply determined, I believe a major cause for stress in young people during the final stage of adolescence (age 18–23) is coping with overdemand. This arises from struggling to assume independent self-management responsibility: “There’s so much to do, I’m always running behind, and when I fail to catch hold, I feel like I’ll never grow up!”

Managing increased demand is daunting and feels costly when excessive because a person’s energy (their readily available potential for thinking and action) is limited. It’s when one reaches the end of available energy to cope, but the demand continues, that overdemand occurs. This is when the opportunity for stress can arise. An emergency energy capacity people can draw on when the demands of life feel overwhelming but must be attended to, stress is a rescue response.

Now they decide to strain (to force) their human system to effectively cope and, in doing so, can incur common mental, emotional, and physical costs. For example, the young college student has waited until the day before deadline (an urgency motivator) to complete a term paper and, so, “pulls an all-nighter” (working through the night and forgoing sleep.) Relying on last-minute stress, the young person proudly declares: “I made myself stay up to get it done!” Mission exhaustingly accomplished and jittery from all that coffee, they feel physically spent but stressfully successful. Thus, procrastination—delaying what is necessary but unwanted—can be a major cause for youthful suffering. Put-it-off/pull-it-off can be a personally costly stress game to play.

While occasional stress is probably unavoidable, constant stress can be debilitating, so it's best for the young person not to make resorting to stress to meet life demands a regular habit. At that point, lifestyle stress (from living with elective overdemand) can prove sequentially and cumulatively costly. So it can help to be able to recognize four increasingly serious levels of stress—alerting to the first to avoid experiencing the others:

1. Fatigue—“I’m worn out!” The young person is frequently tired.
2. Complaints—“I’m hurting!” The young person suffers discomfort.
3. Apathy—“I care less!” The young person loses significant motivation.
4. Collapse—“I can’t function!” The young person feels unable to keep going.

So the advice: Rely on stress to cope with occasional urgency without making it a habit, thus staying clear of more serious effects.

Moderating Self-Demand

For every demand a young person makes upon themselves, some amount of energy must be spent. Since striving to meet excessive demand can be stressful, how demanding does the young person want their life to be? Consider personal performance choices:

• How high do they want to achieve? What goals do they want to pursue?
• How well do they want to do all of the time? What standards do they want to live up to?
• How much do they want to accomplish at one time? What limits do they want to set on their efforts?

Personal goals, standards, and limits are the gatekeepers of demand. If the young person is determined to be the first among others, to be perfect at whatever they do, and to be agreeable to everyone’s requests, they are going to live a high-demand and often stressful life: “I won’t be second best, I won’t make mistakes, and I won’t turn anyone down.”

Stress Essential Reads

How a Bit of Stress Can Keep Your Workplace Running Smoothly

Could a Dog Know I’d Recently Been Attacked by Another Dog?

So the advice: Try not to sacrifice your welfare on the altar of ambition and overdemanding performance.

Maintaining Well-Being

Consider two contrasting ways to support youthful well-being: by focusing on self-advancement and getting ahead and by focusing on self-maintenance and staying well.

At an age when one is supposed to support oneself, make one’s way, and do something with one’s life, focusing on striving and ignoring basic self-care can be tempting. However, doing so can lead to lifestyle stress. Now personal priorities can foster basic self-neglect. “I don’t have time to let up, eat right, sleep well, just relax, and get regular exercise.”

Finally, there is this. At an emotionally vulnerable age, when maintaining effective focus and effort is often harder to do, resorting to psychoactive substance use (alcohol or other mood- or mind-altering drugs) for reward, relief, or escape can become problematic. It can bring more harm than help when a pattern of regular use comes to be depended on to survive: “To cope with one problem, I’ve just created another.” or, “I feel better at the time, but worse when that time is over.” If your young-adult child appears stuck in repeated self-defeating behavior at this challenging period, it’s always worth asking about substance use, perhaps suggesting curtailing what is harmfully excessive or getting help if they cannot.

So the advice: Don’t continually sacrifice personal wellness for self-advancement, and don’t routinely self-medicate with substances to ease the stressful costs.