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My Chemical Romance was capturing a whole millennium of feelings towards kids between the ages of 13 and 18 when they sang “all teenagers scare the livin’ shit out of me”.
I am grateful that I had emo music like that to get me through a time of “shocking transformation”, and “a turning inside out of the mind and soul that renders the person unrecognisable from the child they once were”.
My peers and I, and every teenager before and since, have felt mostly misunderstood, so at least we had bands like Fall Out Boy to make us feel a little heard.
Terri Apter is a psychologist who recently had a chat with the BBC about how scientists have, within the past two decades, been able to decode the mysteries of the teenage brain. They’ve done this by charting the neural changes across this core period of development. (She made those quoted observations above.)
If you have teenagers, or if you merely want to understand your own past brain, stick around because Apter is here to help demystify all the stereotypical idiosyncrasies of a teenager.
That includes the hard-to-control mood swings, the identity crises, the hunger for social approval, the newfound taste for risk and adventure, and the seemingly complete inability to think about the future repercussions of their actions.
It’s a wild ride:
If we are to help teens, Apter argues that we need to pay closer attention to the subtleties of what adolescents are actually going through – including the enormous social challenges that they are navigating.
That necessarily includes a recognition of the embarrassment that may arise from the physical changes to the body, and the shifting social expectations placed on them. In such cases, they can start to feel alien to themselves.
Then, there’s also what’s happening at a chemical level in the brain, a situation that we’re all merely victims of.
For more on that, head to this article for all the ways the brain changes and develops.
On a teen’s rebelliousness:
Brain imaging studies show that the regions of the brain associated with reward generally develop more quickly than those associated with inhibition and self-control.
On average, they have greater activity in their dopamine signalling – a neurotransmitter associated with pleasure and curiosity – compared to both adults and younger children, with bigger spikes when they experience something that is novel or exciting.
This makes teens rush into new experiences as if their future selves depend on it, which in fact, it does. Think about how an awful teen breakup can teach a person so much about what kind of partner they really need.
We can actually learn from a teen’s open-mindedness and fearlessness, which are hugely advantageous in many ways. Look at someone like Greta Thunberg doggedly fighting against climate change while her adult counterparts sit back defeated.
As an adult, we have to intentionally remind ourselves to go towards fear because that is often where the most growth is.
Then there are the mood swings, which are thanks to a teen’s brain’s fluctuations in neurotransmitters and hormones such as serotonin, GABA and cortisol – all of which modify mood quite extremely.
Then, increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex also makes teens a lot more socially aware, where they become especially sensitive to slights and signs of hostility, which increases their susceptibility to social anxiety.
Sleepiness is also a teenage thing Apter points out this is out of their control as their body clocks are literally programmed in a way that is simply out of sync with adults’ rhythms:
“Virtually no adults will have melatonin left in their brains at nine o’clock in the morning,” says Coleman, “but around half of teenagers do.”
So forgive your teen for struggling to wake up. They’re not lazy, they’re just full of melatonin.
The ultimate lesson when dealing with a teen is to simply express a genuine interest in what they are feeling, while also helping them to understand the reasons for the challenges they are facing.
Good luck not getting irritated beyond belief, though.
[source:bbc]
